


The Logic of the Hungry Dead

by skylights22



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Deathly Hallows, Elder Wand (Harry Potter), Eventual Relationships, F/M, Fae & Fairies, Found Family, Gen, Harry Potter Whump, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Protective Avengers, Rare Pairings, kind of a fix-it but with serious trauma, no seriously Harry's history is a tragedy that just keeps kicking, self-indulgent twaddle
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-06-17
Updated: 2020-07-10
Packaged: 2021-03-04 07:07:31
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 25
Words: 63,092
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24779623
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/skylights22/pseuds/skylights22
Summary: Harry's been in self-exile for nearly a decade. A series of betrayals and sacrifices and terrible losses has made him an outcast to the magical world and a stranger to the muggle one. Aimless and struggling to survive, he befriends a green monster on the slopes of the Western Ghats and years later gets drawn in the type of adventuring that torn him apart many years ago.But kindness and teamwork and the type of understanding that come from being a monstrous kind of hero pulls Harry deeper and deeper into a family he never asked for.The world is changing. Threats from the Ministry of Magic and from SHIELD create a thin line for Harry to straddle to protect his dear friends. And all the while, something comes, searching for the cornerstones of existence, to control and destroy the universe.Harry remains, as always, tied to Death and Destiny. A martyr? A magician? A madman? Or a master of the deathly hallows?Part 1, chapters 1-19, finishedPart 1.5, chapters 20-25, finishedPart 2, chapter 26-?
Relationships: Bruce Banner & Harry Potter, Harry Potter & Hulk
Comments: 414
Kudos: 684





	1. Bruce has a headache (Part 1)

**Part 1**

**2012, Kolkata**

The figure in Mitchell’s scope stays away from the window. His crosshairs follow the elusive edge of a body. The tungsten rounds can pierce the weak walls of the shanty, but it’s not a clean shot. He flexes his toes, his mind focused. The position hurts faintly, but he’s been trained to be still and calm. His fingers rests by the trigger of the magnum. 

Mitchell jerks wildly, twisting to look over his shoulder. His pulse is elevated. The sting he felt, exactly like a needle, is fading but there is no one in the room. He searches the dusty corners. The gloom is too thick to peer through, but he would have certainly heard someone if they came up behind him. 

He looks down. Through the fatigues, the plastic cap of a syringe remains embedded and crumpled at the bed of his knee. Before he really registers his fear, he succumbs to the anesthesia, dropped straight down into unconsciousness.

\- — — — -

Bruce Banner has a headache, but that’s a standard state of affairs. An eighteen hour shift at the clinic had transformed into an abduction attempt.

The agent SHEILD sent is deceptively pretty. He’s been handling malaria patients all day, and the day before that, but this might be even more stressful. 

He shuts his eyes for a moment, plays the motion by cleaning his glasses. 

“Radiation expert, huh. And that’s it? I give you what you need, and I just walk away?”

“Wherever you want, doctor,” the agent assures. She has a nice voice, he notices. It’s soft, warm even.

“I don’t think the Army would like that.”

“The Army doesn’t have a say in it, and your involvement would be strictly confidential. It’s in everyone’s best interest if you came and went.”

He reads her without watching, finishing wiping his glasses to think. 

“You guys must be really desperate.”

“Yes,” she says. The word is heavy with emotion. It sends ripples out behind it. And damn it, Bruce is responding.

“Alright. In and out. Easy peasy.”

She smiles faintly. “Lemony squeezy,” she finishes, surprising him into a minute answering twitch. Not quite a smile. 

She stands, drawing the shawl around her, and exits. 

She stills.

“Banner.”

Gone the sweet vibrations of emoting. The tension around her fell in too swiftly and easily. She is blocking the doorway, but Bruce edges in a little sideways, curious and cautious, to look over her shoulder, despite the way she recoils slightly away from him. 

Harry is leaning against the side of the shanty. Bruce hadn’t known he’d returned. He looks unkempt the way poverty and homelessness does, majority coal-burnt hair so thick it swallows all but the center of his face hovering in the dark. Pressed in the shadow, on first glance he looks like another harmless starving vagrant, but there is a stillness about him that in the most observant of people warrants a second glance. 

Bruce shuffles out into the open before Miss Spy or anyone else decides to shoot him. 

“Harry. What are you doing here? How did you-” Realizing abruptly, Bruce looks around, noticing the quiet.

Harry’s eyes, the green of frogs and lily pads, shift upwards towards him, utterly neutral.

The scent of him, like he had abruptly somehow released it, wafts towards him. He smells unwashed, a little like shit but also a lot like sandalwood. 

“Weren’t at the clinic,” Harry says in a road-touched version of passable Hindi, like that explains anything.

“I made a house call.”

Harry glances at Romanov, or more precisely her chin, before staring back at Bruce. A lot goes into the expression despite being relatively shiftless. One had to know him.

Bruce grumbles. He scrubs a hand over his gritty face, jostling his bag, still full of medicine. “No, its… I’m fine. It’s ok. I think. I’m... It’s ok.”

Harry continues to watch him.

“I suppose you’re the one responsible for our missing agents,” Romanov speaks up, tone placid.

Harry’s returning expression is also terrifyingly neutral. Bruce shuffles awkwardly. 

“Yes, well. It’s good… you’re here, I guess. 

“You’re going with her,” Harry says. Not a question. Still neutral. It makes Bruce want to shove him. 

Bruce nods. 

“Trust her?”

“Oh, absolutely not.”

“Dr. Banner,” the agent interrupts. “We are in a bit of a hurry.” 

“Right,” Bruce says. “Harry, I’ll- I’ll be back… in-”

“What’s SHEILD?” Harry asks, switching to his London-bred English.

Bruce sucks in a breath.

“Oh, Harry, no. Don’t-”

“What’s the Tesseract?”

Bruce wants to pick him up and shake him. Of course, he doesn’t. Because Harry knows exactly what he’s doing. He’s staring at Bruce while he’s doing it. Bruce stares at him in abject helplessness. 

“You really want to do this?” Romanov has the decency to ask. 

She removes a pair of wire ties from a pocket beneath her skirt, eyes on Harry. 

Harry doesn’t bother with an answer. He turns and obediently allows his hands to be bound. 

It’s Bruce who makes the small noise, watching Harry’s fingers curl into his palms behind him. With a roll of his shoulders, he’s already adjusted his balance. He turns back around and looks at Bruce as if to say Let’s go.

Bruce has a headache.

\- — — — -

Harry had cut the transmission to their jeeps so it’s an irritable walk to the Chinook. It’s squatted, matte in the dark, beside one of the abandoned railroad hubs, tracks overgrown with grass, but the air still tastes like tin. 

Harry walks with no self-consciousness, outright ignoring if not completely oblivious to the suspicious scowls directed his way. The thirty person team that was apparently sent to contact Bruce in down to eight. Fifteen unconscious and six left to deal with them. If everything weren’t so nerve-wrecking, Bruce would be amused. Harry has an intolerable ability to do this to him. 

They board the aircraft. Without waiting to be seated, Harry picks a niche so Bruce can squeeze into the corner. 

Romanov removes the wire cuffs to fit him in the harness but attaches the line in the straps where Harry can’t reach down to unbuckle himself. Harry doesn’t seem much to care. 

After Bruce buckles himself in and they wait through the take-off prep, Harry extends a finger and realizes he can poke Bruce in the face. 

Bruce swats him and leans away, unwilling to being teased out of being cross. Harry still crosses his legs up in the seat, pressing their thighs together, invading Bruce’s space with his knee. 

Bruce allows him because it _is_ grounding, even if Harry is a dick and a half. 

Harry sinks into his preternatural stillness, breathing going slow. 

Several minutes later, the jets churn. 

Bruce closes his eyes and forces himself to breathe. He pretends he doesn’t notice Harry choosing abruptly to start shuffling around. It’s distracting. Bruce refuses to let himself lean towards him. The Romanov woman is sitting across from them. 

Bruce recounts sutras until the chinook levels and gravity settles low in his gut. 

When he opens his eyes, he notices that Harry isn’t looking at him. He’s managed to contort in the safety harness so that his back is facing Bruce, so that no one can easily look around his slim frame towards where Bruce had been trying not to freak the fuck out. 

Harry glances back at him, just the once, before settling back in the seat and falling once more into his doze. 

They’d left everything again. Harry hadn’t had to, but he did. 

Bruce is sure that Harry has rupees, probably even stolen gems, squirreled away on his person. He probably has extra glasses and something toxic and something useless and something thin and sharp, something sweet, and who knows what else. But he won’t have their battered kettle, their carefully rationed tea, their food, their clothes, a map of where they are going or any version of safety that isn’t already carved into their skin. Harry’s not an inch more than five feet and it is _muscle_ the way Olympic runners are muscle. If they only got their protein from scurrying animals they hunted with their _hands_ and ate _with the bones_ and their greens from chewing on raw weeds. Where there isn’t muscle his bones poke through.

He looks like the stringy type of forest animal that doesn’t get eaten because he’s faster. 

And Bruce got him cuffed to an air carrier. 

He’s pissed at Harry and pissed at himself and pissed at Harry for being pissed at himself because they both knew very well that Bruce was going to leave him and Harry’s the one who stuck his face in it and _Bruce has a goddamn headache_. 

Romanov is watching them. 

Bruce glares back at her. He lets the Other Guy shine through his eyes for a moment, glowing copper-fire green. 

Her gaze only narrows more in unreadable thought before she purposefully turns away, more to preserve Bruce’s pride than her own. 

Goddamn it. 


	2. Monsters Meet in a Monsoon (Part 1)

**Western Ghats (4 years earlier)**

Harry treads through the spongy forest floor, hat pulled low. The heat presses in around him. It’s miserably damp. The plants are all hot, sharp tongues. Insects mewl and swarm. Monkeys chitter above, rivaling the birds. The jungle is a soup, gravid with the threat of monsoon season. 

The pots and rods jingles on his back as he looks for taro root. The jagged, formidable steeples of mountains rise in and out of sight as he climbs the slopes, capped in dusky mist. 

Pushing glasses up his nose, he digs his knife into the ground, pulling up more yams. Most his mood can be attributed to the fresh bag of buckwheat laying in his pack from trading in the village. 

Brushing dirt from the root and sheathing his knife, he looks up straight into two hideous eyes.

His hand is not two inches from a thick green calf. Eyes the color of a copper flame peer beneath swampy curling hair. Beside them rests the curve of a bouldering shoulder, the grim shape of a lantern jaw. 

He is _massive_ , gaze full of incendiary violence, fixed on Harry. 

The giant is nearly five feet wide, a gorilla’s bulk and a man’s blunt face, fastened to the tree with nothing but trailing vines. 

In the space of a too long heartbeat, a butterfly drifts down between them. 

It finds a patch of light on the monster’s angry cheek. 

A paroxysm overtakes the giant’s face before it sneezes. The butterfly goes careening, frightened out of its sparse wits. Sniffing and rubbing its face, the giant hunkers back down into the crevice of the tree, seemingly inspired to forget Harry. 

Harry takes a step back.

The monkeys continue their drama up in the trees.

He paws sweat out of his eyes. Above him, a mother punches a young male upside the head so hard he falls out of the tree. 

There is a huffy sound behind him. 

The green giant is watching the monkeys, laughing with schadenfreude before its gaze drops to where spiders, millipedes, and ants boil in the forest’s carpet. He still looks teed off, but his large finger, as if pressing into the detritus doesn’t hurt the insects, just rustles them into a frenzy.

Harry has a lot to do. Preparing his camp for the onslaught of the monsoon season is a matter between comfortable misery and slow death. 

The giant more aggressively ignores him as Harry walks back into the jungle. The banyan tree and its lodger disappear as smoothly as a ripple. 

— — —

Even after heaven starts pissing, flooding the bowl of the valley, Harry marshals slowly through the wall of the downpour across the treacherous ground to the banyan tree. The giant is still there. 

Harry scrabbles into the umbrella of the aerial roots. The humidity does not abate through the rain. He peels off his clothes and sits on packed banana fronds, hopefully out of range of ants. 

Around them, nature tries to drown the mountain. The downpour eats sound, eats light, so it seems like they are the only things that exist.

Harry watches the curtain of water. The giant, hugging his toes, does not look at Harry. 

Harry is actually smart enough to know to leave well enough alone. He is certainly smart enough to know better than to risk sickness traipsing in this madness. But, despite being wreathed in anger like a slow churning volcano, the giant’s presence is actually quite calming. His energy is less combustive, more ponderous. It drowns out everything else out in Harry’s stagnant, bored mind. 

The forest’s dead aren’t as invasive as the cities’, the natural cycle of compost carrying them onward into the happy silence of roots and green things. But the nature spirits, curious and haughty as the macaques, avoid the giant, even though (Harry soon realizes) the giant cannot even see them. 

It is peaceful — the gush of the rain and the giant’s breathing, like long oars drifting through water. Harry can close his eyes and focus on that, settled in the middle of that overwhelming, leashed rage that almost but not quite pulls him under. 

Stupid to come, a needless risk and a waste of energy. But he doesn’t stop. Not while the giant hasn’t run him off. It’s stupid to look for peace here. Arguably, it’s stupid to look for it anywhere. 

— — —

The **strange man** comes. He smells like **woodsmoke** and something _grassy_ Hulk doesn’t know. He smells like **Midnight**. 

Other men, they came and smelled of **Hate** and **Fear**. They were loud and this man is quiet. His heartbeat is slow. Like grazing animal.

Hulk doesn’t like **Men** , but this man doesn’t smell like men, doesn’t sound like men, only looks like one. 

Hulk likes _green_. This man eyes are green. Like dumb leaves and dumb forest.

Hulk doesn’t like the stranger, but he doesn’t have to hurt him. The other him, the one that **cringes** and **bleeds** and doesn’t want to do anything at all unless he’s made to, he thinks Hulk likes to _hurt_ , but Hulk doesn’t. It feels **Bad** when other things get hurt. He doesn’t like the **screaming** because it’s **irritating** but the _crying_ is worse. And when things don’t move. Things that had **heartbeats** that go _quiet_ and **never heartbeat again** , that’s _worse_. It’s so worse that Hulk doesn’t want to move at all. It’s worse than **Scare** , which happens to _other him_ and Hulk’s heartbeat gets so **loud** he can’t _hear_ or _see_ or _think_. It’s worse than **Hunger** , which makes his head _hurt_.

But the **strange man** doesn’t **Scare**. He doesn’t let out **angry** _smells_ , though he always smells **tired** and **underfed** and a little bit - Hulk has to make a new word like **Bad** and like **not moving** but he _moves_ \- **Broken**. 

Hulk doesn’t like the stranger. He’s **confusing**. Hulk doesn’t like confusing things. Confusing things never **_SMASH_** right. 

Hulk makes growly sounds at the man and bares his teeth. The man looks at him and doesn’t smell like **Scare**. Hulk doesn’t know what he smells like but it _hurts_. Like **Bad**. The man leaves.

Hulk should feel _Good_. He is **alone**. That is less confusing. He doesn’t feel _Good_. He doesn’t like it.

(Mom liked **flowers**. Mom liked _bright things_ that smelled like **outside**.)

Everything here smells **outside** but Hulk finds an _Orange Bright_ and sets it where the man sits.

But the man never comes back. 

— — — 

There are men in the forest. Harry senses them blustering ill-advised through the mush, and Harry doesn’t care for it. Eight of them carrying guns big enough to quell a rhino. No self-respecting local would be this deep in the woods in this season. Harry’s in it because he lacks self-respect in general and is kind of self-destructive in specifics. 

The rain swallows all trace of him as he creeps along the underbrush and deadfall. Their Army rain slicks nearly swallow their white bearded faces. They lift large fronds with the tips of the rifles, searching in a cautious gridlock pattern with miserable silence.

Harry doesn’t like this at all. 

There are probably more over the mountain. Harry pinpoints the leader of the squad and deliberates for several moments, rain sluicing over his cracked glasses, before he Turns the ring. 

The ghosts blur on top of one another, faded faces coalescing into one interminable _thing_. These aren’t cognizant souls, their gaping wounds all tied with one thick saturated red string to the man’s trigger finger. 

It’s not unusual for a military man. Harry has seen ghosts prying at men’s heads, their fingers scrambling for eyelids, mouths disfigured to scream into their faces. 

But Harry Looks. The ghosts are tied in the man’s wake, trapped in his footfalls, his fingerblades. This type of pollution can mean many things, but to Harry, he can see the way the corpses drag. Pitiful more than scary. Trapped. Like possessions. Numbers are scrawled on their featureless faces. 

Harry never knows if murderers like this ever have power over actual souls, rather than this congealed mass of sorrow and pain. He likes to think not. 

They must be hunting the green giant. They aren’t magical enough to be hunting _him_ , and there is nothing else here that requires this level of manpower.

_Are you protecting him?_ a voice inside him asks. _Or are you just indulging your own monstrosity?_

It is probably both. 

_Choice_ , he hears Cyril say. _It’s dangerous, but it is better to have rules._

Killing shouldn’t be easy. People are part of a lattice. Removing one has repercussions he cannot fathom. It used to be an easy thing to know. It used to feel bad. He’d be overwhelmed with guilt and horror, but now, he relies on logic to remember. Murder is an easy out. It builds a structure of the world that relies on violence. Reactive rather than preventative. Its impact conserves power rather than transforms it. 

Once upon a time, Harry wanted to do better. 

_Leave them a choice_ , Harry thinks, invisible in the underbrush. 

It is more difficult to induce a haunting in magically-null individuals without even a folktale to nudge it along. But the rain is miserable, the terrain difficult, and all of them are tired, irritable, and hungry. Harry doesn’t have the parts of himself needed to force his will on the world (an abominable disability if one listens to London’s magical elite). His magic is more of suggestion now, mundane hearth magics, alchemy, and a blown open psyche with a very intimate knowledge of death. 

Harry steals a knife from the skinhead, frames the ex-marine. 

Sows discord.

He disrupts their sleep with strange calls and rustles, footfalls of a stag without a body. 

Seeds distrust. 

He turns their food with mealy worms. 

Fuels tempers. 

The red head stabs the youngest. 

Three of the remaining six yank him off, but the man is already down with a gut wound. They can smell it between his slippery fingers. Rain washes the red pink.

They leave him. It’s crueler than finishing him outright, and the man curses violently until they’re gone. Until he’s terrified of attracting predators and whimpers alone and abandoned in a jungle filled with gods that don’t care enough about men to even spit at them. 

Harry looms over him, glances at the wound and his pale frightened face. 

“Please, please.”

The man’s bloody hand sinks in Harry’s coat, all his strength in his hand and his eyes. 

Can he see the ghosts yet?

“What do you want?” Harry asks in the dark and in the patter of rain. He can’t save the man. In any form.

“Vengeance.”

A contract slides into place. He kneels closer, creates a hood over the man with his back so the man can see the color of his face without water in his eyes.

“What will you give?”

And the man talks. It’s not much, but it distracts from the pain. It holds off the creeping chill, and the more he speaks, the more Harry draws him near, until the man is half in Harry’s lap, spilling his soul and his contacts. Harry takes more from the bargain than expected. 

It’s a mercy, letting him die quiet and in peace rather than torn apart by cats. 

It’s not mercy Harry feels, only a bargain. 

He lets the ghost watch even after Harry beheads it with a short blow of his machete, knowing precisely where meat and spine connect. The ghost is frowning and grimacing, but he follows silent and beholden as Harry takes the head to desecrate the men’s campsite. The ghost however completely unironically enjoys the terror it inspires when they find it in the morning, their gibbering watch kicked in the side. So new to death, he possesses the strength to make his severed head halfway laugh, a sputtering gasping grunting sound that makes the men glossy-eyed with fear before it quiets once more into petrified stillness. 

They flee from the jungle, but the jungle takes them anyway, shattering series of accidents and hungry animals that fulfills the dead man’s curse. 

The entire haunting takes three days. 

The unending rain washes their corpses, their gear, their passage through the jungle. Harry dismantles and scatters the guns. The bodies, the ones not gobbled by opportunistic hunters, he undresses, scavenging what’s viable to repair his own worn, weary wardrobe. He ritually cleans the blades to sell, takes one tent and one pair of boots, and packs the rest to sell as well when the weather lets up. 

The ghosts touch the bodies of their murderers with timid shyness, confused. They moan pitifully at Harry as he begins the taxing process of untangling them. It’s a lot like untangling the slippery, putrid clog in a drain. Harry doesn’t flinch from the residue, from their ugly faces as he takes his fingers to the knot of their tragedies and unwinds them. Loose threads begin to fade away, to dissolve in the wet terrain. 

By the time he finishes, the smell of death smells cleaner, more like woodrot and fungus than meat, and his bones ache and his stomach is raw, and the little spirits that clean the dead have circled around him, white capped and sucking on their black fingers like children. 

He nudges them aside, both exasperated and relieved that they don’t seem to fear him anymore. One even leans into his palm like a sickly two-legged version of a hairless cat before returning its attention to the horror-born feast he left behind him. 

Water-logged and starved, he begins the journey back to his camp. 

— — —

When Harry returns to his neglected camp, he half expects to have to try to root out a tiger. The lumbering green creature is more of a shock. It is midday. Enough light slants into the ruined temple for Harry to make him out, block- and black-headed. 

Before the hunters, Harry had thought he was an asura or deva.

The creature inhales loudly and deeply.

“ **Smell like men**.”

It’s English. American even with its caveman tilt. 

He says it in the way of an accusation.

“Killed some,” Harry replies, waiting. 

The green creature tips his head.

“ **Bad?** ” 

“Yes.”

Harry squelches inside the shelter. Last year, he made good shoes from deer pelt to replace his old ones, so his feet are mostly dry. He skins out of his oiled coat, flops the soggy trousers on the ground to wash, and struts about slathered in insect repellant but otherwise bare until he gets the fire going. 

The roof of the temple bowed to the elements long ago. A battle, a landslide, or any number of more nefarious things caused the damage. Harry hasn’t tried to pry into the memory. 

The creature follows with his eyes. He’s nude but seems about as brash about it as Harry. 

Harry has enough cattail fluff collected for tinder, and dry bark buried under the stone for kindling. He gets a fire going quickly. Everything else he stored still appears dry and useable. He burns more citronella oil and conducts the laborious task of preparing food.

“Do you eat?”

The creature glares at him for being stupid. 

The longer Harry goes about his business, the closer the creature comes until he’s perched by the fire. Darkness falls early in this season. The creature looks curious then absolutely appalled by the snake meat. Harry takes the double portion of meat and gives the creature a jackfruit. 

He seems to take enormous satisfaction in tearing it open and then pops the whole half into his mouth like a grape, wrinkling his nose as he smacks at it. 

It’s been a long time since Harry’s had a dinner companion. Months? A year? It feels rusty inside him. 

Harry finishes eating and sets up his clothes on handmade racks to dry about the fire. 

The jungle at night is loud, nocturnal beasts hunting and dying out of sight. Harry has wards up, but it was unsettling when he first traveled here. Russia, not even China, had been so volatile during the witching hour. The rain barely muffles the wilderness. He’s not surprised it helped drive the men mad. 

Once, this courtyard was surely lovely. One of the merciful bodhisattvas lies cut at the knees. His sleepy eyes watch them from the rim of the firelight. The stone steps try valiantly to fight the growing fauna. The ambulatory is raised so none of the water reaches them. Harry found caved roofs, green forests, and vines in every room. 

“ **Come for me** ,” the giant says.

Harry doesn’t have to ask what he means, but he doesn’t reply.

The giant stands. He lumbers out of the temple, and Harry closes his eyes, listening to the rain. 

The giant comes back.

Harry tries not to look at him, but he can’t not. He can’t help but stare as the giant ignores the dark and the downpour, utterly impervious, and lays something down by Harry’s side. 

At first, Harry is not entirely sure a piece of fire hadn’t leap onto the floor. It looks like a cluster of embers. Then he recognizes the flower. He knows the name because it is a useful medicine and Harry talked to more than one ghost before he attempted survival here. 

Flame of the forest. There are so uses for the entire tree, but the flower, shaped like a talon with folding petals and bright vermillion, is an aphrodisiac, an astringent, and can help treat liver disorders. Which is all superfluous information that doesn’t quite distract him from the fact that this simmering, massive thing has given him a bundle of red, beautiful flowers. Like a wound on the floor. 

Harry touches them, soft and velvet, and can’t look up. Can’t think. Can’t remember what he’s not supposed to. 

No one has ever given him flowers before. 

“For me?”

The giant is facing away but shoots him a blood-curdling glare that could range from “Of course not, you boob. I left it there for Santa,” to “If this turns into a conversation, I’m smacking you into the pillar.”

It’s an odd, tangled feeling to accept them, more than a little wilted from whenever the giant picked them. They rather look shorn from a branch. The creature’s fingers have crushed a few. 

He picked these a while ago, to give Harry before he went off murdering people. 

Harry is afraid to touch them. To somehow disease them with himself. 

“What’s your name?” he asks.

The insects sing. The animals screech. The fire spits. 

“ **Hulk.** ”

“Hullo, Hulk. I’m Harry.”


	3. Fury's Interrogation (Part 1)

**Somewhere over the Pacific, 2012**

Harry wakes when the Chinook lands. He’s dehydrated and starved but otherwise serviceable. They remain as the agents disembark. 

Romanov detaches his cuffs but leaves him free to unbuckle, his hands in front as she retreats off the aircraft. 

“You ok?” Bruce asks.

Harry nods. 

Light spills from the open bay, carrying the scent of brine and the sound of ocean. 

When he steps into late afternoon sun, no land is in sight. 

Other aircraft populate the deck, being herded into hangars. Fuel hoses and gear thread the platform, tended by men and women with military quickness. Clipped voices and orders carry. Harry squints to avoid the bald glare of the sun off the sea. 

Agent Romanov is speaking with a straight backed man of army persuasion. He’s gym-trained muscle, crew-cut blond with a typical handsomeness one expects on action film stars, not real serviceman.

Harry emerges first from the craft in front of Bruce and the man’s eyes center on him. 

He looks confused, glancing down at the restraints. 

“Uh. Dr. Banner?”

Bruce pipes up behind Harry, raising his hand. “That’s me.”

The man looks between the two of them. 

“Um. It’s nice to meet you,” he says and offers his hand. 

Harry and Bruce hesitate before Bruce finally walks down from the latch, answering with a handshake.

The man looks slightly relieved. “Steve Rogers,” he says. 

“Bruce,” he says softly. They disengage. “But you knew that.”

“I like to make my own impressions,” Rogers assures, smiling. His eyes follow Harry.

Harry meets his gaze, measuring the weight of it. He doesn’t come across as much of a manly bulldozer as his physique suggests. Polite interest, curiosity, and a modicum of suppressed humor.

“Uh. I heard we got engaged with some trouble. Are you trouble?” Rogers asks. 

“Likely.”

The humor blooms to tilt the corner of his lip.

“Right. Well. Same could be said of me I guess.”

He offers a hand. 

Harry stares at it before offering his hand back. One wrist rotated to shake with the cuffs. Rogers doesn’t try to pulp his hand, only pumps it politely, smiling like he knew he’d been awarded a rare treat. 

Bruce laughs, aborted and little hysteric.

“Come,” Romanov says.

The deck is almost empty. 

Peering at it and the hatch, Bruce says nervously, “I’m, uh, not so good with small spaces.”

Unmoved, she merely raises a delicate eyebrow. “Well, the air’s going to get a little difficult to breathe soon.”

Bruce swallow hard. 

Harry isn’t much inclined to follow anyone into a small dark hole either, not with his hands bound. He bumps Bruce with his hip until he has the man’s attention.

“Down or over?”

Bruce’s worry contorts into a glare as he considers the open sea. “No.”

“Hm.” Harry’s voice is scratchy from talking so much recently. “Chances of a transformation are less than expiring of heat stroke or dehydration in the open water?”

Bruce levels him a dry look. 

Harry strides towards the hatch. 

“People here will actively avoid trying to piss you off,” Harry says.

“ _You’re_ pissing me off,” Bruce grumbles, but he follows.

“By the way,” Romanov says as they stride past her, “we’re not on a submarine.”

“ _Please clear the landing deck_ ,” a mechanized feminine voice calls. “ _Please clear for ascent. Please clear the landing deck.”_

— — —

The ship groans. It moves with cranky amble. It doesn’t smell like salt and people. It smells like polish, like fresh plies of paint and the plastic that adheres to new-made metal.

The hall at the bottom of the bolthole is well-lit. The compact metal-grid boxing and tubes he expects from movies is replaced with a certain ovoid opulence that calls to mind some futuristic cartoon from the eighties. The mechanics are flushed into the walls. LCD panels operate rooms. 

Harry, who (excepting Surrey) has spent his life in pre-Medieval magical cities, fey leas, caves, castles, caravans, forests, and slums, has a surreal moment of wondering when his life had transformed from a Tolkien novel to an Iain Banks one. 

Bruce has just gotten down when the deck lurches. Harry and Rogers both go to steady him. 

Rogers backs off with an awkward not-smile, stiff-backed. 

Bruce’s grin is strained as he straightens. 

“The Director wants to see you,” Romanov tells Harry.

Bruce latches onto his arm, says, “I’m coming too.”

Romanov smiles back. “I imagined you would.” 

She walks. The deck occasionally lifts awkwardly, strangely buoyant. Her stride is perfect. “You’re in luck today,” she says over her shoulder.

“Why’s that?” Bruce asks, hugging the wall. 

“We only do torture on Tuesdays.”

“Isn’t... today Tuesday?” Rogers asks. 

“Whoops.” 

Harry waits for Bruce to move gruelingly forward. At least he’s moving, but his eyes are closed, jaw clenched with every subtle shiver of the vessel. 

At his side, Harry wonders aloud, “Air conditioning is nice.”

Bruce strains through a morbid chuckle. “Your distractions need work.”

Harry pauses a moment. “It’s nicer than the ocean?”

Bruce slides him a look, highly annoyed. “You are not helping.”

They reach the navigation deck. 

A platoon of technicians work at their stations, navigating the behemoth under their feet. The wall in front of them is full of convex windows, bulging out into what Harry quickly realizes is sky.

Bruce curses quiet and fervent in Portuguese.

The ocean ducks below the rim of the ship. The sky ascends. They enter a white-wash of clouds. The engines tremble as they catch a current and fly. 

Behind them, Rogers exchanges money with a man in a trench coat and an eye-patch.

Bruce whimpers. 

——————

“So,” the director says, sitting across from him at a round table, “who the fuck are you?”

Harry is looking down at the table. He hasn’t been secured to his chair. His hands are still in front of him. He’s sitting in the open, at the bridge, and not in a closet being interrogated by a man with a baton. It’s leaving him a little wrong footed. 

He considers the man in front of him. Director Fury wears the mantle of authority with the assured confidence of an apex predator. Despite a rather loose comportment, he looks intense the way lazily smoking volcanos do and turtles that fucking bite. His eyes don’t stray. 

“Harry,” Harry answers. “You sent for Bruce.”

“You got a problem with that?”

Bruce, for all that he isolates himself with extreme prejudice, longs for stimulation. He values the vaccinations and the health care he provides, but Harry knows he hates it, the lack of control, of decent management, the watered medicine, the polluted streets, the midden piles, and the poverty. His thoughts run in circles with nowhere to go. 

Harry says, “Had a problem with the guns.”

There’s a woman at Fury’s right, stern and steel. Her hands are laid behind her in parade rest, but she’s alert the way osprey are when they hunt. Her gaze territorial.

Harry demurs from looking into her eyes. 

“Yeah, I saw that,” Fury says. “Fifteen agents down.” He peers shrewdly at Harry. “I have a pressing need to know how that happened. How did you know we were coming?”

Harry stares at him, but he’s being serious. 

“You cleared out a section of the slums,” Harry says, it being bloody obvious.

Rogers coughs and looks over the rail at something that caught his interest. 

Fury doesn’t say anything for a second. There is a file on the table, a slim manila folder under his index finger. After the second ends, he skates it down the table. 

The folder collides with Harry’s fingers the moment the Director says, “Harry Hartson. You filed for a marriage certificate with the French embassy in 2001. Though the name is obviously fake.”

Harry opens the file. 

There is his photo. Twenty-one. Shorter hair. It’s a muggle photo so it doesn’t move. Before the aos sí, Harry never saw a photo of himself that didn’t look like he was cringing out of frame. Even in the candids Ginny took, he looks mortally embarrassed, like being caught besotted was evidence of a crime. Here, he’s looking directly into the eye of the lens. He’s not smiling. He’s clean, well taken care of — his shirt is pressed, his hair loose and shiny. It’s too bad his eyes look dead. He doesn’t remember posing for this. 

The document is signed with a muggle signature that’s not his, and it has VOID stamped in red. And there’s Gabby’s signature, with pretty loops. It’s a very tasteless joke. He wonders if Gabby had been trying to play a prank. His birthdate is printed later, 1983 instead of 80, which would have made him just old enough to apply for the license. She had never cared for their age difference. 

“See,” Fury drawls. “I’m very intrigued why a bunch of French aristocrats would go to the trouble of trying to create, badly, a false marriage document for a British national from Surrey.”

The address of No. 4 Privet Drive is indeed written on the document. Careless and arrogant, Gabrielle.

Harry pins his motionless face down with his forefinger. 

“You could ask them.”

“I’m asking you.”

Harry imagines the early days of his residence in Cyril’s charming chateau. That address isn’t on here, but Gabby’s signature is. 

“This,” he says, “feels mostly like Gabrielle’s idea of a joke. I don’t know exactly what she was thinking, but it was either part of a prank or,” he shrugs. “Something more sinister. Marriage allows a spouse certain control over their medical decisions, doesn’t it?”

Fury inclines his head, his eyes sharp. 

“I was under the care of a private physician. She visited. I would like to think she saw this as a twisted form of romance. But I’m not very skilled at predicting what people will do.”

“Don’t suppose you’d name the facility?”

Harry names one off the cuff that he knows was demolished, quite used to covering his tracks.

“And the physician,” Fury says without moving.

“Maybe that could be on our second date, Director.”

Fury stares at him and surprisingly lets it go. 

“Tax revenue says you became a dependent of Mr. and Mrs. Vernon Dursley in 1981,” Fury continues. “When your parents died in a car crash. No records of that. Lily Evans, like you, disappears from the school registry at age eleven. School reports say you were something of a delinquent. Bullied kids. A liar too. You got a staff member fired after she went to police saying you were abused. And you were transferred to St. Brutus’ Secure Centre for Incurably Criminal Boys when you were eleven. Only St. Brutus isn’t a saint,” Fury says. “And no such school exists.”

Harry hums, not sure if he should be impressed. Gabby’s careless use of the address would have made tracking the information as easy as a phone call with an agency like this. Interesting that they don’t know his real name. The Dursley would not have given him theirs even on a tax document. How else would it have appeared on a school registry? 

“Uncle made it up,” Harry says.

“What?”

“The school. Uncle made it up so he’d have something to tell the neighbors.” 

“While you went missing,” Fury inferred.

“Have you spoken with my uncle?” Harry asks. 

“He died. A heart attack six years ago… You don’t seem broken up about it.”

“He never took care of his health when I lived with him.”

Harry debates about asking after his aunt, decides not to.

“I’m sensing that you two had not had the best of relationships.”

“No. You could say we did not enjoy one another’s company.”

“Can’t have been a very good childhood environment.”

“There are worse.” Harry considers some of the ones he’s seen. “He wasn’t a pervert or a cultist at least.”

“Low bar.”

Harry shrugs. 

“So where did you go?” Fury asks. “If not St. Brutus’?”

Harry returns his curious, predatory stare. 

They would know his father’s name if they interviewed Petunia. It should have been on the school records. 

Someone erased the magical side of his history. Someone hid Petunia. Probably under a Fidelus so they can’t talk to her. Or maybe they charmed her, made it less likely to leak secrets. It feels like the work of the Order, hiding Harry’s weak points, but there is something insidious here too that he can’t quite name. Holes that don’t make sense. This has the feel of a trap. 

“I’m not allowed to say.”

“Oh.” Fury finally leans back, finally looks smug like this is the way the interview was supposed to go “That’s the way it’s gonna be?”

“I’m not allowed to say what I’m not allowed to say.”

“Started living with your aunt and uncle in 1981. How old were you?”

Harry doesn’t answer. 

“How long have you known Bruce?”

“Three years.”

“That’s twelve years unaccounted. The way you took out my people shows training. I wanna know what your goal is, who you’re working for.”

“My goal?” Harry repeats, thrown. It’s a reasonable question for a spy boss but… He looks at Bruce, who’d been watching the interview like a tense tennis match. “What’s your goal?” Harry asks him.

“Right now? Not to let you get shot.”

Good luck. 

Harry hums. “Not… to let Bruce… be vivisected… or experimented on. That is my longterm goal.”

“Thanks,” Bruce mutters.

“It does not pay.”

“Or clearly come with benefits.”

Fury asks, “You two done?”

“Sir,” Bruce starts cautiously, clearly sensing a bit of danger. “Harry’s not… normal. But I don’t think he came here with an agenda. And, this may come off as trite but…” He glances at Harry. “I don’t think he has loyalty to anyone but those he considers friends. And he’d never betray them.”

“That does not equate to not betraying SHIELD,” Fury’s second speaks up. 

“Definitely doesn’t,” Harry agrees.

“Harry, shut up,” Bruce hisses without looking at him. 

“You could have killed my people,” Fury says, apropos of nothing, thoughtful. “Rare to see a take-down that quick and that bloodless. Why didn’t you?”

“You cleared out the slums.” Fury’s eye twitches so Harry clarifies. His throat hurts. “They don’t usually. Civilians are easy shields. And when they get hurt, they use it to justify Bruce’s arrest and hurt Bruce in the process because it makes him guilty.”

“Hey,” Bruce pipes up.

“I don’t answer care with violence,” Harry says.

Fury nods. “You could have warned Dr. Banner. Why didn’t you?”

Harry looks at Bruce. 

Jaw clenched, Bruce nods.

“Last year, I stopped an abduction attempt before they reached Bruce. They tear-gassed a children’s clinic.”

“What happened to the culprits?” Fury’s Second asks. 

“Lost them in the woods,” Harry says.

At length, Fury asks, “What would you do, if I put you in a cell?”

“That’s-”

“Hush, Banner,” Fury interrupts him, looking directly at Harry.

“I would wait,” Harry says.

Fury lifts a brow. “For what?”

“To not be.” 

Fury stares at him harder.

“I can’t tell if you’re really fucking dumb or really fucking smart,” Fury finally comments. 

Harry — cuffed, wearing about two week’s worth of a sleep debt and his depression beard after hunting a deranged rakshasa — lifts his hands. He hopes that’s eloquent enough. 

Fury looks like he might nearly actually smirk. 

“Read him in,” he says. 

“Sir,” the Second protests, clipped. 

The director ignores her. “We’ll be watching you. Closely.”

“Hmm. Usually charge for that.”

Bruce releases a long sigh and drops his head in his hand. He takes off his glasses to begin rubbing his eyes, the general sign of Harry exceeding what Bruce calls his bullshit allowance. 

“And someone get them both to the showers. You, in particular,” Fury says, pointing at Harry as he stands, “are rank.”

Romanov nears. Harry allows her to cut the tie. She takes the file, sweeping the photo inside. 

Almost immediately, a packet is dropped in front of him, NDAs. Meaningless legalities honestly. Nothing that will hold up because Harry doesn’t legally exist to them. He wonders if the sentiment is supposed to cement that. We could hurt you, kill you, and it wouldn’t matter, but look at the nice papers we’re having you sign instead. He lifts the first page, squints, and has to fumble through his pockets for the bubble-wrapped glasses he keeps. They patted him down before they got in the chinook, taking his machete and paring knife, but left him his softer effects.

“You are frankly a little terrifying,” Rogers says amicably as Harry unwraps the tape. “I like your glasses.”

Harry glances up. He doesn’t see any mockery. Just a shy, somewhat fumbling effort to be friendly.

“Thank you.” Harry searches him up and down for a compliment to return, but he is in uniform. He settles on, “You have kind eyes.”

Said eyes widen, and his friendly smile goes a little lopsided as his shoulders curl and he shuffles his feet.

“Mios dios,” Bruce mutters. 

Bruce takes his own packet and parks it beside him. 

The two of them read. 


	4. Need a Strategist to Talk Strategy (Part 1)

“This is the device that compromised our agents,” Agent Coulson tells Bruce. A middling aged, balding man with a smear of a smile, he packs a small thimble of boyish humor into the corner of his eyes. “Anything you can discover would be useful.”

Bruce wiggles his glasses. 

There aren’t any runes carved on the device or that interfere on the psi-spectrum, making it too foreboding or welcoming. Yet, Harry feels tension, as if he were standing blindly in a room with a taut line. A vibration against the hairs on his skin. The wards must be concentric and atomic to cause the containment to glow. Bruce did not detect any harmful radiation. Still, the pressure must be immense. If the power in the scepter is ever released full stop, it would burst their eardrums before the brain damage would certainly kill them. 

Terran wizards are not capable of making this. The thaumaturgic metallurgy alone isn’t Terran. 

This never should have found its way to muggles. 

Bruce is decked in neoprene gloves, googles over his glasses so he looks like some sort of bug. He’s inspecting the spear over some sort of rotisserie, frowning. 

“How did it exactly compromise your agents?” Harry asks Coulson.

Coulson grants him a curious, professional glance. “Loki tapped the tip of it to their chests.”

Dissatisfied, Bruce moves to a plasma cutter. 

Coulson and Harry both take a step back as he puts on a heavy vest and welding mask. 

Draping the coil over his shoulder, Bruce turns on the torch and sets it to a curve in the spear. After a few seconds of furious squealing and gold sparks, he turns it off, lifts the tool and mask, and stares at the unaffected piece. 

“So he tapped them with the tip,” Harry continues. “And they... acted controlled?”

Bruce wanders to another side of the lab. 

“Essentially,” Coulson says.

“How did they look?” Harry asks. “Bad motor control? Delayed reaction times?”

“Why so interested?” Coulson asks. 

“Why do you think?” Harry gives him a dry, unaffected tone.

Bruce’s figure, buried in a thermal radiation aluminum suit, shuffles into the room with what can only be described as a death ray gun. 

Coulson sighs. “Dr. Banner.”

Bruce glances at him in a yes-whatever-is-the-matter? sort of way from behind the visor of the suit. 

Coulson wisely never-minds him, and they herd themselves behind a walled section of reenforced poly-glass. 

“They do appear pale,” Coulson says while Bruce spreads his feet, hefting the death ray against his hip. “Facial markers indicate signs of extreme stress and exhaustion.”

The gun releases a long pneumatic hiss through the open intercom before the scepter’s metal starts to throw sparks in a small fireworks display of green, orange, and indigo.

After a full minute, Bruce stops. The metal glows a lemony hue. It takes another ten seconds before settling into its original color.

Propping the laser on a table, Bruce removes the suit’s hood. He gives the scepter a disgruntled scowl. 

“Have you ever been in a dream,” Harry asks, “where your body does things you don’t want it to? Like it’s following someone else's script.”

Looking down at him, Coulson considers, “Is that what you think the agents are in? A dream?”

“Maybe.” Harry thinks of the cushioned complacency of Imperius. 

Bruce is half shod the aluminum suit, perched on a stool in front of a computer, lost in numbers and physics. 

“If it is a dream,” Coulson considers. “Then they might wake up.”

“Would you say your agents are particularly strong-willed?”

“Yes,” Coulson says without hesitation. 

_In sleep, we are vulnerable_ , Harry thinks.

If the reason they look exhausted is because they can’t sleep, because their minds might wander from the scepter’s rule, then the solution should be simple. But Harry won’t be able to test theories without examining the scepter’s wards and outing the magical world. 

Coulson says nothing more. He turns from Harry and steps back into the lab. 

“We managed to capture Loki,” he says. 

He only gets a grunt from Bruce. 

“Captain Rogers thinks it would be prudent to include you in the proceedings,” he adds patiently. “If you want.”

It takes a few seconds for the words to register with Bruce. When they do, he glances up, first at Coulson then Harry.

With a nod, Bruce shucks the rest of the suit. 

Coulson doesn’t attempt to dismiss Harry as he herds them to a room full of monitors. 

Rogers and a man in cape and regalia loom over a crowd of screens. An agent in a rolly chair mans the computer, but they are otherwise alone.

“Prince Thor, this is Dr. Bruce Banner and his associate Mr. Harry Hartson,” Coulson introduces. “Dr. Banner, Mr. Hartson, this is Thor Odinson of the Planet Asgard.”

Thor glances at them. 

He is broad as a draft horse, with a long stream of golden hair and surprisingly little of a beard. He’s clad in modest armor. He’s unexpectedly young. 

Thor was in the briefing packet, but Harry had taken it with a grain of salt. 

Their second year of school, Binns introduced them to Terran and non-Terran gods (using the term loosely), and Lupin had gone a little further into detail in Defense their third year, but Harry only vaguely recalls their history with the Aes. 

Thor looks stereotypically like a viking Nord. Loki, inspecting his cell with mocking amusement, does not. Translucently pale, raven-haired, tall, and whip-cord thin, he also looks nothing like a child of a fire-demon like Surt.

Most of the screens show the standard visible light spectrum, but others show the figure in infrared. Loki’s core temperature would kill a mammal, matching the room temperature. His brain and hands read the highest temperature, 26˚C. 

Loki smirks into the cameras like he can see through the lens straight into the monitor room.

“What is it?” Bruce whispers to him. 

Harry shakes his head, listening.

“ _Impressive cage_ ,” Loki says. Even his accent reads plummy Oxford vowels, though maybe that is the way the translation spell interprets arrogance. “ _Not, I think, built for me_.”

“ _Built for something a lot stronger than you_ ,” Director Fury says. 

“ _Oh, I’ve heard_.”

Bruce goes still, and Harry thinks, Ah. 

——— 

In the strategy room, Harry makes a beeline for the kerig set up on one of the countertops. The line of tea bags is a disgrace. He chooses the lesser of evils in the form of those tiny Green Mountain cups. 

“I fear my brother may be scheming some other plot,” Thor says. “He never idles in captivity.”

Harry touches the machine briefly, to figure out the works. Then he cracks a water bottle and fills the side. 

“You know him best,” Romanov says.

“I think I hardly know him at all.”

“Still more than most,” Coulson says. 

“What does he want to do with the tesseract?” Rogers asks.

“Loki took the primary scientist studying it after we found the Valkyrie,” Coulson says. “The plane,” he iterates for Thor, whose expression clears. “We only know it… collapses space to create bridges between vast distances, and that it needs exponential energy to do so. We suspect the only reason Loki hasn’t yet used it is because he lacks a powerful enough source.”

“Bridges where?” Bruce asks.

“Theoretically,” Coulson says. “I understand anywhere.”

“Coffee?” Harry asks.

After a beat, Rogers raises his hand. Thor mimics the gesture after leaning to peer curiously over Harry’s shoulder. He gives off heat like an oven. He’s certainly not the same species as Loki. 

“Great. So,” Bruce says. “He’s going to try to make a bridge to theoretically anywhere. I’m guessing army?”

“Army,” Rogers agrees. He smiles gratefully when Harry delivers his mug, sitting up straight and thanking him without even looking at the brew. “What about the scepter?” he asks Bruce when he’s less distracted. 

“I’ve only had it for ten minutes,” Bruce grumbles, arms crossed. “I’m not sure what all it can do. And for how it controls minds...” He shrugs, arms still crossed over his chest. “We’re in the realm of sci-fi.”

“Dr. Banner, you’re a two ton green giant when you’re angry,” Romanov reminds him. “In a flying battleship.”

“I don’t know how the other guy works either.”

“This feels very choreographed,” Rogers says. “Loki was captured too easily. It feels like he’s exactly where he wants to be.”

Thor, cradling a mug of a hazelnut brew very very carefully, says, “That is very likely.”

“Unfortunately, there is no other place to put him,” Coulson says. 

“I guess a room for me would have to be very secure,” Bruce remarks.

The kerig makes a tinkling sound in the silence as another cup fills with coffee. When the water stops, Harry tries to decide if he should add sugar.

“The protocol is to only place you in that room in the case that a transformation may destroy the ship,” Coulson says. “Since you seem very in control, I imagine Fury wagered that we won’t need it.”

“Or,” Romanov says. “We give you a mind-control device, that as far as we know only Loki can use, and Loki occupies the one place slated to keep our primary base intact in case you transform.”

Bruce’s eyes widen to the size of galleons. 

Harry passes the table and snatches Bruce’s wrist. Bruce flinches and stares at him.

Harry stares back. 

After a moment, Bruce forces himself to relax, and Harry releases him.

He slurps on the bitter roast. It’s too hot.

“Chocolate,” Harry mumbles.

Bruce huffs, even more of his tension falling away as he distracts himself cleaning his glasses.

“Chocolate is not the answer to everything.”

“You haven’t eaten in over twenty-hours.”

“Have _you_ eaten?” Bruce throws back. 

“I’m not, what’s it called? _Hangry_?”

“You think my fragile id is less likely to go on a rampage if I have a Snickers bar?”

Harry slurps coffee.

“That’s not how it works,” Bruce says.

“You said you don’t know how Hulk works,” Harry reminds him. “Could do an experiment.”

At last, Bruce looks like he might be smiling. “What, feed me chocolate in the name of science?”

“That sounds awesome!” a man crows as he enters the room. 

He seems to have come from nowhere, striding passed the agents assigned at the door with a tamarin’s manic grin.

His hair is spiked, a Van Dyke carefully shaved on. Rose-tinted shades in gold frames and a loud navy and striped red business suit complete a florid ensemble. 

“Is this the party?” he asks, hopping around and winking at people below in the pin. 

Harry glances at Coulson. The agent has an expression like a butler who got a whiff of a fart. 

Completely ignoring the appalled silence (everyone trying to catch someone else’s eye to deal with this), the man swipes the shades off and strides up to Bruce.

“Hey, you. Love your work on anti-electron collision. The green rage monster thing is cool too.”

He sticks out his hand. 

Flabbergasted, Bruce shakes it. “Thanks?”

His smile is full of white teeth. He flips the shades back on and swings around to let his eyes catch almost accidentally on Harry. 

“Oh. Hello. Person. Small rat-monkey. I thought I got the invite list.” 

He looks Harry up and down.

“You Fury’s cabin boy?”

Bruce lets out a high, hysterical laugh and preemptively grabs onto the back of Harry’s jacket. Before Harry can decide whether or not his coffee is _too_ hot to throw in someone’s face, Bruce carefully removes it from his grip, trying and failing to smoothly step between the two of them.

The man angles around him, asks with a leer, “Got a name?”

Harry, letting himself be corralled, says, “I don’t give out my name to pimps.”

Coulson, of all people, laughs. He then fails to turn it into a polite cough and does not look remotely sorry.

The man turns a pouty frown on the agent.

“Rude. Seriously. How has no one not dressed you in something not plague-ridden?”

“Well, I’ll have my people call your people if I ever want to do a lesser imitation of camp Al Capone.”

“Oh!” Rogers exclaims, jerking up. He flushes when everyone looks at him. “I got that reference.”

“Cute,” the man says again, head tilted. “You aren’t one of Fury’s lackeys. I can’t imagine you’re one of Princess Rapunzel’s. Widow eats people. Captain Freeze is new, so that means you belong to Dr. Banner.”

Bruce lets out another gutted sound and giving up trying to be subtle, physically inserts himself in between them. “H-hey! Look at… literally anything else.”

He pushes Harry back and glances down with teeth to say, “Don’t.”

“Didn’t.” 

“Continue to not.”

“Hmm.” 

Bruce grimaces uncomfortably. 

“Stark,” Coulson says in a tone of voice like he’s used to dealing with third graders. “Harry Hartson is Dr. Banner’s associate,” Coulson tells Stark.

“Harry,” Romanov says, like it's not the first time she's ever called his name, “Tony Stark is a genius. He’s also a dick.”

Stark gasps in mock-offense. “You kiss your mother with that mouth, _Natalie_?”

“Only on Christmas,” she throws back.

“So,” Stark drawls. He wanders around the deck. “Loki stole a bunch of iridium out of Germany to stabilize the energy draw so the portal won’t explode in his face like it did at SHIELD’s hidey-hole. Wow, that sounded gross. He’d be able to get the rest of the raw materials to keep it open pretty easily. The only thing else he needs is a power source of high energy density. Something to kickstart the cube.”

“What energy density?” Harry asks. 

Stark glances at him like he’s stunned anyone dared to speak. 

Bruce doesn’t notice the question at all. “He’d have to heat the cube to 120 million Kelvin just to break through the Coulomb barrier.”

Harry glances at him. He has no idea what a Coulomb barrier is but that amount of heat… “Nuclear?” He can’t be thinking of hurtling it into the Sun. 

Bruce is distracted, not inclined to catch Harry up on his thoughts.

Harry shrugs and the grip Bruce has on his jacket loosens enough to pull away. 

The Tesseract is inert. In order to open it, for it to start the type of quantum tunneling that circumnavigates the static laws of time and space, it needs a power source capable of overcoming the repulsion between protons, as Harry rudimentarily understands nuclear science. 

While Stark and Bruce mull over the implication, Harry addresses Rogers, “He’ll need a point of contact.”

Rogers blinks. “Loki? For the bridge? What about whatever his attack force is?”

“If he entered through the Tesseract from SHIELD’s lab,” Thor says, “he will have no point of reference to determine where any forces are. And your technology is limited to linear travel. After he opens the Tesseract, he would be unable to pinpoint any ship with your resources.”

“There’s non-linear travel?” Steve asks with startled interest. 

Thor starts to smile at him before Romanov interrupts.

“So. How would he know where the army is?”

Grimacing slightly, Rogers offers, “The scepter?” When they glance at him, he explains, “The scepter is what he carried over from wherever he came from, and it… controls minds,” he adds, still clearly unsure about the tenets of life at this point. “I mean, that’s a form of communication we don’t know about. It doesn’t operate on satellites.”

“That far out into space?” Romanov notes doubtfully. 

Before anyone answers, they all note the heavy tread of the director’s shoes. He swans in with his trench coat fanning. 

“Oh yippie. Stark’s here,” he greets, even more droll than usual.

Stark, cocking his hip, retorts, “You pine.” 

“Dr. Banner is here to track the cube. I figure you might want to help him.”

“Bruce can play in my sandbox,” Stark allows.

“I think we’ll know in two and a half hours once we finish the script,” Bruce says. “Then, Harry and I are leaving.”

Rogers and Thor glance at Harry. This is the first Harry’s hearing of it. 

“Aw, but we just met,” Stark pouts. 

Fury ignores them both. “That wasn’t our deal.”

“Ha ha. No.”

The agents in the room stiffen.

“Come on,” Stark cajoles. “Don’t leave me alone with these pleebs, Buttercup. You’re the only one who speaks my language.”

Bruce responds with a strained half-smile, looking at nothing. “If Agent Romanov’s right, I’m a risk. To everyone. I’ll do my part. Then we’re off.”

“You got words on this?” Fury asks Harry, brow risen. 

Harry meets Bruce’s gaze.

“I follow Bruce.” 


	5. Can we communicate like human beings? (Part 1)

Harry piles himself on top of a cabinet with a clean view of the lab and the entrance, and where he can hear inside the vent. Bruce and Stark’s conversation drifts up, but he’s not paying attention. Rogers’ samsung has an easy passcode. No names in the contacts, just three numbers, no outgoing calls. The sky wallpaper is a bland default. Harry thumbs open the internet browser and pulls up a search engine. 

He types in “Tony Stark.” 

The first thing that pops up is the Iron Man. Harry skims the headliners, making no sense of the shiny robot before he’s engulfed by TMZ articles and tabloids about a sex tape and a drug scandal. They make it seem recent but it’s over a decade old. Harry gets to a Guardian article and clicks. 

He’s a Fortune 500 baby, owner of Stark Industries. After he was kidnapped by insurgents after a weapons demo in Afghanistan, he dissolved the weapons division of his weapons company. It only suffered half a month of tanking stock before they released a line of emergency vehicles to the military. SI designed a new evac jet, launched a new telecommunications campaign, a cellphone line with an astonishingly intuitive OS, and announced a new lead in green energy. The oil companies and the military don’t particularly like him right now, which explains the smear campaign.

Harry clicks on the Wiki page. Entered MIT at age fifteen. Graduated top of his class only two years later with his first degree in robotics. His thesis was on artificial intelligence. When his parents died in ‘91, he became the youngest CEO of a Fortune 500 company and proceeded to be drunk, rich, and intelligent all over the world before handing over the CEO position, though not ownership of the company, to his PA Virginia Potts in 2010. Harry finds articles from Reuters and Life and Popular Science. 

Harry gets the abridged version of the man’s life. Fortune, fame, sex, and robots. The context of the Iron Man begins to resolve. 

Most the internet community not starry-eyed or feral for reasons Harry cannot comprehend is flabbergasted by the mechanics. There are Reddit chains dedicated to theorizing over his fuel cells, and more than a few videos of conspiracy theories about the armor actually being empty and the helmet projecting a hologram. 

After about an hour, Harry darkens the phone. 

Stark complains and has been complaining, loudly, about the equipment. 

In Asia, Bruce had to scavenge parts from scrap heaps, had to haggle with gangs of feral boys barely into their teens. 

“You know,” Stark says brightly, bouncing and dancing on his tiptoes. “My lab in New York is practically candy land.”

“I don’t doubt it,” Bruce says. 

“You could come.”

“That wouldn’t be smart.” 

“You’re not made for vaccinating polio.”

Bruce looks up. “That does a lot of good.”

Stark rolls his hand on a limp wrist. “Yeah, I know. I’m not kicking it. Just, _you_. Is that really what you want to do?”

Harry knows Bruce scrawling chemical equations in dirt, face wistful and chagrined as he solves the problem of un-recyclable plastic with sodding genetically engineered mushrooms, as he breaks down the chemical compounds of polluted rivers to torture himself with theories he can’t test. The furnace of his brain runs itself without rest. 

Bruce administers watered-down drugs. He looks at infected water and watches industrial filth shipped from the UK and the States be dumped in sprawling landfills the local inhabitants don’t even own to profit from. And he doesn’t get numb. He gets angry. It sits underneath his skin.

Harry knows Bruce in poverty, disenfranchised, with nightmares. He’d never known him satisfied by anything. 

“Come on,” Stark cajoles. “I have all the best toys.” 

“The last time I was in New York, I broke Harlem,” Bruce says.

Stark walks around him.“I promise a stress free environment. No tension. No surprises.”

He then stabs Bruce with an electric prod. 

Harry has Stark shoved facedown on the table, his arm twisted high up his back, before Bruce’s finishes his yelp. 

“Harry!” Bruce shouts shortly after the sound of Stark’s body impacting against the table. 

Other than a high-pitched yipping and a muttered “Christ!” Stark doesn’t struggle. 

“Harry, Harry, it’s alright,” Bruce says, words tinged with panic. “It was a joke. It was a joke. I’m alright. Everything’s alright.”

Harry breathes in. He shifts his hold so the pressure doesn’t lie on Stark’s tendon. Stark’s other hand Harry has pressed at the wrist, in reach of the weapon but no longer clasping it. When Stark doesn’t lunge for it or make an attempt to buck him off, Harry withdraws further.

He sweeps up the prod. Tony lets him step out of striking range without trying to retaliate. He merely straightens, looking over his shoulder. 

Bruce wrings his hands. 

Harry unscrews the bottom of the prod, plopping out the batteries, while observing Stark. 

“Whoops,” Stark says, slightly breathless. “Won’t try that again. That was done in bad taste.”

His smile is gristle. He leans against the counter, not trying to get in Harry’s space but not retreating from it either. His mind, leaking everywhere in the emotional turbulence, tastes like motor oil. Like _runrunrun_. But sharp with menthol too. Like fear and curiosity and _don’t-hurt-me_ but _I-can-take-it_. 

Harry drops his eyes back down, not sure whether or not he meant to slip a taste. 

Stark has a prey-scent, unexpectedly. Fleeting and quick and clever. 

_No, no! Anything but the briar patch!_ Harry thinks, linked but discordant. A fable from a library, hiding on a dusty shelf of his youth. 

He lines the batteries on the table, but the prod he pitches over the railing down towards the bowels of the tanks that cool the carrier’s engines. 

Stark huffs in amusement, accepting the unspoken rule with admonished grace. His eyes gleam. 

Abruptly breaking the tension, the door opens with a swoosh.

Rogers marches in with a handful of white bags and a hopeful look. It defies reasons that his face lights up when he spies Harry. 

“You mentioned food,” he starts but falters when he registers their expressions. 

Stark bounces off the counter and goes to a computer. 

When neither Bruce nor Harry move, Rogers uneasily sets the bags up on a counter and starts hesitantly, “I hope you don’t mind. The cafeteria is a little overwhelming. I might have gotten too much.”

There are a lot of cups and boxes, and Harry smells teriyaki and sweet and sour sauces. His stomach clamps on itself like it’s trying to smack its lips. 

“Thank you, Captain,” Bruce says, coming to the rescue. 

Smiling awkwardly, Rogers pulls something out of his pocket. “Harry mentioned chocolate.” 

He did indeed. It’s a Hershey’s bar. 

Rogers offers it towards Harry, but he must notice something. Something in the way Harry stands maybe. He sets it on the table instead and starts to rummage through the bags, withdrawing cartons. It’s only when he and Bruce start chatting, divvying up the counter space, that Harry feels inclined to place his fingertips on the chocolate bar, watching Rogers’ back. Nothing happens. Of course it doesn’t. No reason to expect something should. Harry inches it closer and steps back with it, going around the table to appear at Bruce’s other side. It’s soft and it will melt rather than keep. 

Bruce claims a nutty salad for himself and sets a chicken wrap in front of Harry while talking short nothings about Indian food to Rogers. Harry scoots the salad aside for a box of fried rice. After scowling a moment, listening to Rogers’ response, Bruce puts a carton of beef in front of Harry.

Harry gives him the spring roll. 

Bruce starts to hand over a cup of yoghurt before abruptly remembering Harry’s atrocious manners. 

Harry plucks the cup from his retreating hand anyway, earning a withering look.

“Wow,” Rogers notices. “You two are really… in sync.”

“Bruce needs carbs,” Harry says, claiming a chair out of range of Bruce’s plucky fingers.

“ _Harry_ needs carbs,” Bruce retorts.

“You gave me protein.”

“You need protein more than carbs and your stomach is the size of a hamster,” Bruce complains. 

Harry peels the top of the yoghurt just as Bruce finishes the process of locating spoons.

“Here.” Bruce shoves one at him aggressively, his tone vaguely pleading. 

Maintaining eye contact, Harry sticks his tongue directly in, reaching the bottom. He finds a near disintegrated peach part and scoops it up into his mouth. 

Disgusted, Bruce throws the spoon at him, hitting him smack in the forehead. 

“Are you four?” 

Harry swallows and bends to pick up the plastic. “You’re the one throwing utensils,” he says reasonably.

“Use. The spoon.”

“It was on the floor.”

Rather than argue - Bruce has watched him eat crickets and ants before - Bruce unwraps another and shoves it at him with forced politeness. 

Bruce’s eyes go green when Harry opens his mouth for another needless complaint about plastic waste. He takes the spoon instead. 

“Thank you.”

“You’re welcome,” Bruce says, like he isn’t imagining hitting him with Harry’s own detached limb. 

Rogers’ amusement has spilled over, though he manages to keep his expression mostly polite. “I’m surprised you don’t turn into Hulk more often.” 

“Thanks to Harry, I know being _massively irritated_ isn’t the same as all out rage.”

“You’re welcome,” Harry says.

Bruce’s serene expression doesn’t so much as twitch, which makes Rogers turn away to suppress laughter. 

“That’s, uh, good then.”

They turn their attention to eating.

Rogers puts back just as startling an amount as Bruce. In ten minutes, they bull through everything with relative grace. Not messy but determined. Rogers manages to look like he could put away an entire cow. Bruce once devoured two kilos of rice while he was working because Harry kept refilling the bowl and he wanted to know when Bruce would stop. (Bruce had been more upset than actually angry over the waste.)

Watching the two of them, the strange unspoken camaraderie when Bruce is frightfully skittish of anyone else in uniform, draws Harry to some assumptions. 

Rogers eats with even more intent than Bruce, trying to get everything inside without tasting it, with speed but with practice of not wasting an ounce of anything either. He doesn’t look full or sated by the end of it. With the supernatural logic of having food then not having food and not noticing much difference in between. 

“Are you like Bruce?” Harry asks. His own meal was packed away with sticky fingers. It’s hard and uncomfortable inside him but he never leaves food. 

He gets a flabbergasted look from the young soldier.

Bruce grimaces. “It’s more I’m like him than anything.”

A flash of revelation hits Rogers’ face.

“Oh, um, yeah. I’m... Captain America,” he says awkwardly.

“Is that a codename?”

Stark, eavesdropping, sputters into laughter. 

Rogers’ widened eyes, his open mouth, imply he’s too shocked to answer. 

“Captain America is a super human serum project tested on American soldiers in the 1940s,” Bruce explains. 

Harry looks over Rogers’ features. “Eternal youth?”

“God, I hope not,” Rogers bursts out then looks mortified. “I mean…”

Harry spares mercy on his fumbling. “Then?” He gestures to his body. 

Uncomfortable, Rogers fingers crawl into a fist on the table. His pinched gaze remains polite. “I was, uh, frozen. In the Arctic.”

Harry doesn’t look at him, considering the information. He hums but is otherwise silent. 

Bruce begins tidying. 

Not sure when another quiet moment will come, Harry wipes his fingers and sets Rogers’ phone between them.

Rogers stares a moment before, “Ah,” searching his pocket. 

He shoots Harry a wry look before taking it back.

“I don’t think there’s anything on it.”

Harry politely doesn’t mention how true that is. He also doesn’t mention he has Stark’s wallet. He tossed the credit cards but kept the $1200 he had in crisp unused bills. 

“You want to ask,” Harry says.

“Pardon?”

“You answered mine. Ask me two?

Rogers considers. “You asked three questions.”

“And you answered two.”

Rogers seems to sense they’re playing some strange game. Startlingly, he doesn’t ask the question Harry expects.

“How old are you?”

Observant.

“That’s one I can’t answer.”

“Where were you born?”

“England.”

Rogers’ eyes him slyly. “Can I ask for a favor instead of an answer?”

“You can certainly ask,” Harry says in a way that makes it clear Rogers just used up his second question.

It gets him a somewhat self-deprecating laugh, but the good humor remains despite.

“Maybe. Call me Steve?”

Unexpected. It endears him somewhat. The man is friendly. Harry had assumed for a ruse, but he can tell that Rogers genuinely likes him. How far that goes is a guess. Despite his brawn, he’s not a meathead, a critical thinker and someone with a bit of a sweet tooth for troublemakers it seems. 

Harry considers him.

“You all are so very odd.”

“ _We_ are?” Stark scoffs in the background, alternating between typing and munching on blueberries from a pack Rogers certainly didn’t buy. 

“How so?” Rogers asks warm. 

“No one’s tried to intimidate me.”

“Harry, you are impossible to intimidate,” Bruce speaks up. He’s in the process of returning to his coding program, not looking up. But his voice is fond and exasperated. “I promise, they have been trying to intimidate you since Romanov first cuffed you. They’ve been scowling at you and fingering their guns and I honestly thought Fury was going to shoot you for a moment.”

“Really?” Stark perks up, eyes lit with the promise of gossip. “But you’re like… the size of a gerbil. Like a hairy hamster. Harry the Hamster.”

Harry hums, ignoring Stark. “Well, I expected…”

“No, do go on. I know you’re going to say something that going to make me very angry,” Bruce says almost jovially. 

“Well… I thought they’d rough me up a bit. Maybe lock me up and ask a few questions. But if I didn’t struggle, I thought the chances of them actually shooting me were low.”

Bruce stops typing, glances up at the ceiling (or God), and closes his eyes. 

“Then _why_ did you insist on coming?” he asks. 

It seems obvious. “If I didn’t come I would have never seen you again,” he says frankly. 

Bruce’s jaw tightens. He opens his eyes but doesn’t look at Harry. After a moment, he returns to his work.

“SO!” Stark says loudly, manic. “I’m changing the subject because you two are giving me hives. How about that Tesseract?”

Steve looks so grateful he’s willing to ignore his overall distaste for Stark’s brashness. 

Stark continues to eat from a packet of blueberries. It becomes quickly apparent that Steve and Stark can’t talk about the elements of the Tesseract and what SHIELD has given in data packets without the science going over Steve’s head. Steve wisely navigates around both their brewing frustrations to-

“What should we do if we get it?”

“SHEILD’s already misused it,” Stark says, belligerence in the snide tone. 

“I know,” Steve says. “But what else should we do with it?”

“Destroy it?” Stark offers.

Steve gives him a look. “If you know how, by all means.”

“I will. Have a means. Soon.”

“-Because laying it down in the Arctic sure as Hell didn’t work,” Steve says over him. 

“Even if SHIELD does reclaim it,” Stark says, chewing. His mouth is dark with berries. “I don’t think they’re going to file it back in some archives like Indiana Jones.”

“Like what?” Harry and Steve say at the same time.

“God, I’m getting you two to the movies. Tasty Freeze, I kind of get, but what’s your excuse, Tarzan?”

“What?” Harry repeats more slowly. 

Stark swallows, some self preservation kicking in. “I mean. Cap was frozen in the ocean for 70 years. How do _you_ not know what Indiana Jones is?”

“What?” he says once more.

Stark smirks. “They don’t have TVs in the jungle?”

“Racist,” Bruce remarks. 

“Bruce, I’m carrying out an inquisition!” 

“... Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition?” Harry tries.

“Yes!” Stark exclaims, nearly throwing the bag. “Why do you know that and not Indiana Jones?”

“…I’m going to guess because Monty Python is better?”

Stark hams a dramatic gasp. “You take that back.”

“Is this relevant?” Steve asks.

“No,” Harry decides.

“Not even a little,” Bruce adds. 

Stark just grins. “As I was saying,” like he didn’t completely derails the conversation to start with, “I don’t think SHIELD is going to put the Tesseract in storage if they get it.”

“This is a little late but you know there are recording devices in here, right?” Harry remarks.

“Not around me, baby,” Stark says.

“Don’t. Call me that. Please.”

They all jump when Rogers inexplicably slams his fist on the table. Harry skitters belatedly in front of Bruce and stares at the massive dent Steve put in the aluminum, folded around his fist. He leans over with his shoulders shaking, flush with anger or embarrassment. Maybe both. 

“Sorry. I just. I _just_ set it _down_ ,” he hisses, hanging his head. 

Harry feels the helpless anger etched in every line of him, like an actual physical current. 

Steve rears back from the table and leaves, barely making the doors when they part. They clip his shoulder.

A moment after he’s gone, Stark twirls in his stool. “You know. All this conjecture is redundant. We’ll have a better picture when my program finishes decrypting SHIELD’s files.”

“Excuse me?” Bruce asks.

“You’re excused. The program’s been running since I hit the bridge. In an hour, we’ll know all SHEILD’s dirty little secrets. Blueberry?” 

Bruce hesitates before taking it.

“Won’t you get arrested?” Harry asks.

Stark snorts, fishing out a few more blueberries, and eats them. “Considering the very illegal things they did to find Loki - I mean, the privacy of the world’s citizens is a thing. It’s an abstract thing, but totally a thing - and the fact that I’m me - yes, hi, I’m very rich and my lawyers can out-lawyer their lawyers any day. They law so hard... What was I saying?” 

“You’re above the law because you’re rich,” Bruce replies.

“ _Yes!_ What? No.”

“I’m reconsidering jumping overboard,” Bruce says. 


	6. Pulling the Carpet Out from Under Them (Part 1)

Harry sees only sin waves on the monitor in front of Bruce. The x- and y-axes spin, but Harry doesn’t understand what they mean. Its relation to the scepter might as well be gibberish. With Stark working on the other side of the station, it’s a few moments of quiet. 

“Do you think I’m wrong?” Bruce asks abruptly. 

For a moment, Harry is about to say he has no idea before he realizes Bruce isn’t talking about the graphs. 

Any minute, the program will ping a location for the cube. They’ll confirm the location and Harry and Bruce will be off into the sunset, wherever that may be. It won’t be Kolkata. 

Harry had gotten carried away. He’d talked himself into believing Bruce needs the stimulation, but it isn’t true, is it? It is Harry. It’s him who has to hunt something wrong in ever town they travel to, looking for problems so he can play hero because he’s empty and bored. 

“No,” he says.

No, he doesn’t need the stimulation if it risks Bruce’s peace and Hulk’s safety. That should be logical. 

Harry hears boots in the hall, the heavy tread of the Director, before he comes barreling into the lab, followed by Agent Romanov.

“Stark,” he snaps. “What the hell are you doing?” 

Stark looks up from a terribly mangled device that looks like a gnome cobbled it from an old transition radio and chicken wire. “I’m poking the stick.” He gestures with the rod. “What are you doing?”

Fury ignores the question. “You’re supposed to be locating the Tesseract.”

“That’s what I’m doing,” Bruce inserts, clearly trying to avoid a fight. “I’ll be done in less than five minutes.”

“No really,” Stark says. “What _have_ you been doing?” His eyes are wide and innocent as he asks, “What’s Phase Two? Looks naughty.”

A vein is Fury’s forehead ticks. “Stark.” 

Steve, despite his size, is quieter as he stomps into the lab, through the doors Fury left open. He drops a wieldy modified arm cannon on the table with a dramatic thud. 

“Phase Two,” he says. (Clearly has long-ranged hearing), “is tesseract-integrated weapons.”

“How did you get that?” Stark asks, looking delighted. 

“Had an argument with a door,” Steve replies blithely. He glares at Fury. “I won.”

“Captain,” the Director says, “we gathered everything related to the Tesseract. That doesn’t mean we’re-”

“Oh, I’m sorry, Nicky,” Stark interrupts. “What were you lying?”

He turns one of the screens on its swivel towards him. The cannon on the table is shown in its intricate parts and construction. Harry honestly can’t read the blueprint or the teeny notations but Steve can.

He sneers. “Everything is exactly the same.”

“Did you know about this?” Bruce asks Romanov. 

“You want to calm down, doctor,” she says, her hand moving rather in counterpoint towards the gun on her belt. 

“Calm,” Bruce repeats. He starts to rise. “I was _safe_. I’d finally gotten away and you, you...”

Bruce’s watch beeps. He visibly struggles with himself. 

“This is not what I came here for,” Bruce says, every word drawn out. 

Thor rather stumbles into the room headfirst, alarmed by the raised voices. “What is happening?”

“Nicky’s been dipping his fingers in the cookie jar,” Stark says. 

Thor only look more confused. 

“They’re making weapons,” Steve snarls. “With the Tesseract.” 

“You wanna know why?” the Director yells. “Because of him!”

He jabs a thumb at Thor, ironically the only one in the lab other than Harry not spoiling for a fight.

“Me?”

“A small sibling spat leveled an entire town,” Fury says. 

Thor’s voice starts to rise. “I am not your enemy.” 

“We need to upgrade and update. Before someone like you, or like Loki, decides we don’t belong on the map anymore.”

“It is you who has proclaimed to every advanced species that you are prepared for a new class of war.”

“No one waits for civilizations to advance to declare war.”

“And stockpiling weapons? That always works, doesn’t it Nicky?” Stark says.

“Says the Merchant of Death,” Romanov scoffs. “Lot of people died before you bothered to decide you cared.”

Stark’s face does a slow dangerous thing. “That’s rich, coming from you, Red.”

Romanov stills, eyes grown cold.

As one, shouting breaks out. 

“You mortals-” “-your family who broke your brother and we’re paying-” “-and how many people have you murdered, _Natalie_. What a pedestal you judge from when-” “- all hypocrites-” “-but it’s all the same-” “-not beholden to your-” “-know what you’ve done-” “- _fuck_ that-” “-your compulsive need to-”

Harry looks at the graph. The waves have condensed, reminding him of a seismic chart. The volley of voices and anger ricochet one off the other, building. 

“Hey. Hey!”

No one hears him. 

Harry clicks out of the graphing program. There’s an audio program with samples of sound, efficiently labeled by ascending terahertz. Touching the computer’s memory banks a little, he finds the tab for the speakers as the morons crescendo into mindless insults. 

The wail is piercing. Harry lets them cringe for a beat before he turns it back down. Thor and Steve look painfully dazed.

Harry doesn’t bother making eye contact before he calls over Bruce. 

“Come look at this.” He maximizes the graphing program and pulls back the playhead over the time stamp.

Bruce leans against his shoulder. 

“It was influencing us?” He looks horrified.

Harry hums, unable to read any of the marks. Still, it doesn’t take even an idiot to know _something_ was happening.

“Why didn’t it effect you?” Fury asks, still suspicious and pissy.

_Beep_. 

Everyone looks at Bruce.

He throws up his hands. 

“Wasn’t me!”

“The Tesseract?” Thor asks, coming around to perform his own examination of the figures. His gaze, unlike Harry’s, seem to understand the maths.

“I can get there fastest,” Stark says as he slips around the table. 

Steve clearly tries to head him off. “Woah, let’s think of a plan.”

None of them finish.

The world 

**JERKS.**

— — —

The explosion yanks the ship out from under their feet.

Harry slams into railing as many other loose items careen into him. He tilts arse over teakettle, plummeting, before hitting the floor like a rag doll, jarred to the marrow.

Lights are red, and somewhere, a klaxon screeches, if it’s not just the ringing in his head. 

He’s on the floor below the lab, with the round cisterns and mesh panels covering thick tubing and cables. 

For a minute, all he can do is whimper and try to catch his breath. 

One of the heavy storage cabinets landed close, ripped from its moorings, metal dented but still locked. Harry is lucky it didn’t land on him. 

As it is, there is a stinging muscle under his right buttock that promises to bloom into agony given time. He has a large bruising abrasion on his forearm, and his teeth feel like they flew into the back of his throat before popping back up. Otherwise, he’s fine.

“Bruce?” he tries to call. 

Another distant boom, accompanied by a shudder through the hull, answers back.

Harry attempts to stand. His brain sloshes briefly. It’s too dim, the maintenance corridor too shadowy to see past the cistern. 

“Bruce?”

This time, he gets a rough gargled cry.

He ambles forward, inner ear tilting him kind of leftward. He expects exactly what he comes across. 

Bruce is in the midst of an aborted transformation. He is hunched over his knees, hands strangling his hair like they might reach his brain. The coarse high-pitched grunts coming from his mouth accompany crunching bones, growing and diminishing beneath skin abruptly elastic. His knuckles are bleached to a patina.

Harry steps up to him. The way his vertebrae expand to press up and down under his shirt will never not be spooky, but he turns Bruce over. 

Bruce snarls. His hands snap out from around his head, failing to snag Harry, before Bruce presses them back to revolting organ and bone. He bares his teeth.

Harry settles over him, rolling with Bruce’s uncontrolled buck (ignoring the sting of pain in the pulled muscle), and takes Bruce’s frothing mind into his own. The rage and panic are like wrangling a whirlwind. Harry doesn’t catch or control it as much as let it inside him. It feels good almost, the turbulence. Harry moves with it. Hulk’s wrath can’t unbalance the structure of Harry’s mind, no matter how much he huffs and puffs and blows, and Harry can sit here for as long it takes Hulk to notice, enjoying the rare sensation of emotion against his neurons.

As Hulk’s intent siphons through Harry, Bruce begins to relax beneath him, sweating and pale. It has the cyclical affect of calming Hulk until it feels like the full weight of the young creature is sitting inside Harry’s brain, a hot morning-grump against-along-within his walls. 

Spiky about being forced awake, Hulk does what Harry considers the equivalent of shoving the covers back over his head and retreats entirely from Harry’s mind. 

Bruce collapses. Breath heaves out of him, eyes squeezed shut in the remnants of agony. 

Rather enjoying his spot, Harry sits back, giving Bruce more space for his diaphragm. 

Some shaky Spanish emerges before frantic Bruce asks,  “Did I-”

“Nah,” Harry assures. “Not even a little.” 

Bruce shivers and falls apart, quietly and small. When his watery eyes open, he peers around them. His hands come up instinctively onto Harry’s knees.

Something hidden under layers of metal knocks ominously.

“Ah. We _are_ under attack though,” Harry says.

“ _What?_ ” Bruce gasps and proceeds to panic again in a much more Bruce-like manner, fussing Harry up off him.

Bruce doesn’t seem to notice himself trembling, his pupil dilation, as he works off the chemicals of the half-change, and he doesn’t protest at all when Harry stands closer than normal. He merely quirks one of his expressive eyebrows when Harry quietly links their hands too. 

Out of the tangle of equipment, Bruce rights his glasses and considers their position.

Harry gestures towards the entrance, lurking under a red light. “Towards imminent death and destruction? Or away?”

“Did I bleed anywhere?” Bruce asks, in lieu of an answer.

“Not that I saw.” 

“This entire section should be quarantined.”

“Let’s tell them,” Harry says. 

Bruce gives him a look, one that says he doesn’t think Harry is funny. 

“Towards,” Bruce says with a sigh, like it was ever really a question.

“Hmm. I do love you,” Harry informs him, as he periodically does, as they hop over one of the fallen units.

Harry bathes in Bruce’s defensive embarrassment, in the tight clasp of his hand, all the way into the hall, where chaos blooms.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Just to let you wonderful readers know, I went back and edited just the beginning of the story. Just the part about Mitchell. I realized I had that scenario from a previous edit and completely forgot to update it with what I had in mind for Harry's powers. This will become clearer later. It's a very small detail. 
> 
> If you don't want to go back to read it, I just had Mitchell get jabbed by a needle instead of implying Harry used I guess the magical equivalent of CO poisoning. 
> 
> I want the story to be consistent. I wrestled back and forth over whether to change it and decided to do it like this.
> 
> :)


	7. Interlude - Natalia (Part 1)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is a short one. 
> 
> I'm calling Natasha Natalia in the heading because Harry spent several years in Russia. The -sha at the end of Russian names is a cute, familiar way of addressing someone. Harry uses the Anglicized version of her last name (the male Romanov, rather than Romanova) but I've decided that he thinks calling her Natasha is overly familiar since he knows she's actually Russian but he doesn't know anything else about her. 
> 
> Have I thought about this too much? Yes. Yes, I have. 
> 
> (In her POV though, she calls herself Natasha.)

**Interlude**

**.:Natalia:.**

Natasha waits until both of them are gone before trying to get the chest of tools off her. Her ankle is wedged against a corner, pinned by weight under the edge of one of the cisterns. She wiggles underneath, levers her shoulder beneath a drawer and shoves. The chest slices into her skin as she slides it out. Bone is fractured. It’s hairline. Acceptable.

Crawling out, she makes her way back up to the lab, cataloguing her injuries. Minimal.

The scepter lay in a snag of equipment wires, its blue glow saturated to purple. 

She wraps it in the discarded linen and hesitates only a moment before righting the screen Stark had been using. It’s cracked but operable. Hunting the code he used to hack their database is easy. 

SHIELD saved her life. She owes Nick, but her debts don’t dull her sense for opportunity. If anything, they make her keener.

The network is down. She saves what she can, takes the hard disk from the hard drive, and stashes it in her uniform. 

Her mind is running three different ways.

The only person who can orchestrate an attack like this is Clint.

Clint, Coulson, Nick. 

They are the only people on her list, the people she won’t fuck up. The ones who gave her a chance to be more than an empty cartridge in a smoking gun. She escaped the Red Room to be an assassin for hire, work tedious and purposeless. It was Clint, the only Good decision she’d ever made, that let her live like a human being. 

Clint, Coulson, Nick. 

Clint, Coulson, Nick. 

“ _Harry said something interesting_ ,” Coulson said to her not an hour ago. “ _He said the agents compromised by the scepter might be trapped in something like a dream._ ”

“ _You believe him_ ,” she said. She could know Coulson inside and out, but she rarely knew why he did any of the things he did, neither practical nor truly emotional. Based on an instinct she was never trained to develop. 

“ _He reminds me of someone_ ,” Coulson said. 

“ _Clint._ ”

And he had looked at her, wry and a little enigmatic. She had never given him cause to look at her like before now. 

“ _You_ ,” he had corrected.

She still doesn’t understand.

She doesn’t want to think of the way the man who accompanied Banner, name fake, his eyes too much like a loss that erased him whole, climbed on top of that monster. _Because_ she doesn’t want to look at it, she stares down its damn throat while another part of her goes with the scepter to find Nick. 

Harry Hartson had had no fear. He didn’t hid it or contain it. He had none. And his body, where she couldn’t see his face, had gone slack with relief as he took Banner’s face and without words or rope or fear calmed that terrifying half-transformation. There was more trust there than she had ever witnessed between two people. 

The man wears cold steady pain. Banner wears fear and guilt. She can’t fathom how they learned to trust each other enough to be in each other’s blindspots. Natasha trusts Clint because she knows him. Banner doesn’t know the mysteries of his friend, she’s certain. And Hulk is unknowable.

She doesn’t understand, and not understanding is a threat. Unpredictability she can’t use. 

Natasha (Natalie, Natalia) knows every black, mirrored surface of her mind. The angles of herself repeat, a thousand personalities lined like dolls. She can be everyone and anyone, and doesn’t know why the reflection of her against Harry Hartson is no one at all. 

She will prepare for every eventuality. 

But first, she’s going to save Clint. 


	8. Fall (Part 1)

The decks at the fore of the ship are bedlam. Agents rush to douse electrical fires. Others carry their maimed colleagues, hopping over technicians buried chest-deep in hatches and wires. Bruce attaches himself to a woman lifting a man with a head injury over her shoulder. Harry joins a band of gunmen fighting off boarders behind the shelter of a ripped out panel. 

“What do you need?” he asks a woman with a headset. 

She fires two shots with her handgun and ducks against the panel to reload while her subordinates switch. 

“Comms are down,” she says, steely calm. “They’re trying to blast onto the bridge. We got them pinned but all it will take is one blast to the nav and our guidance is down.”

“If I help direct their fire, can you get someone up and over?”

“Through the ducts?” she asks, but Harry can already see she’s going with the idea. She calls over one of the petite female agents. 

She and Harry prep setup. Harry takes her gun to lay coverfire. The bulk in his hand is unfamiliar, the recoil forcing his shots wide. She smirks tiredly as she strips to underarmor, lessening friction and weight.

“Got a name?” she asks.

“Harry. You?”

“Khosravi.” She looks fierce, calm and exhilarated at the same time. She takes her gun back, firing more expertly as they wait for an opportunity at the access hatch.

The agent with the headset tosses them clips. Harry stares at his blankly until Khosravi snatches it and reloads herself. 

“Newbie?”

“Not an agent.”

“What-”

He belts out from cover, and the agents lay suppressive fire over his shoulder. Harry goes low and catches them by surprise.

Eyes the count. 

Five. 

He knees someone in the gut so hard and high their lungs seize. The gun grip slacks. Harry drives into them. His forearms smash into collarbone before he clinches their head, keeping the gasping, dazed body between him and the next. The ones behind waver their shot, reaction times indeed slow.

Harry uses the half second to turn One’s body and kick, knocking Two down. Harry whips both himself and his clinched opponent, driving them down the hall, trampling Two’s chest. Harry hears gunfire behind him. As the clinched person starts to stumble, he ducks beneath them. 

He bounces off the wall, barely avoiding a bullet as he steps past the shooters. He knocks into Three. Instep, pivot, placing a body between him and the shooter again. He wrenches their arm. Muscle tears. Four shoots anyway.

He drives the body into the remaining two. Four stumbles, and the blade Harry stole cuts under their lowest rib through the weakness in their gear. They scramble for their side. The serrated edge catches and Harry has to leave it. 

He blocks Five’s gun from rising, using the momentum to clinch, to grab their sleeve and haul them closer. They look terrified. Rings of exhaustion lay beneath his eyes, beneath the patina of blue that rings them. He does nothing but blink at Harry, breath hitching in little hiccups. 

Harry stops. 

Harry shifts them down as his hands start to twitch. Too much adrenaline and fear and panic.

Khosravi had dropped down ahead. She’d taken out the ones further down the hall working on the bridge door while they focused on Harry. She nears and begins securing the living injured.

“What did you do to him?”

“He can’t take anymore. His mind’s unraveling. Take off his helmet.”

Khosravi does so. Boots stamp by them.

Harry looks into the man’s eyes, but he can’t get a grip on his mind. There’s a wall. He can’t even see through it. 

The man’s hitched breathing continues, getting louder. He jerks more violently, eyes losing focus. 

There is nothing Harry can do as the man remains trapped in the nightmare, heart straining. 

“Xanax,” Harry mutters. “Valium, Ambien, do we have any of those?” 

Khosravi shakes her head. 

The man dies. His soul narrows to a pinprick in his eyes before hollowing out entirely.

Harry closes the man’s eyelids. 

Not even dying in the line of duty. Taken. Turned against everything he was working for. Suffused in shame and terror. 

Agent Hill, the ship’s Second, steps through dismantled barricade. She’s nursing her side and has a streak of soot down her forehead. 

“We’ve secured the bridge,” she tells him. Her eyes skirt the wounded before fixing on him. “The Director headed to the hangar to secure the scepter. Back him up.”

“Sir-” Khosravi starts.

Harry turns and obeys.

Bruce’s voice follows him from somewhere before Harry disappears down the corner. 

An explosion takes another turbine. The helicarrier lists starboard. Harry bounces an uneven step off a wall and keeps going. 

The ships feels like it’s being wrenched in two. 

He touches the hull and Remembers the imprint of hallways to the hangar belly.

The firefight has spilled out across the deck. 

The bay doors are open, one jet running ready for take off, but Harry sees Fury’s team is pinned. Stray dark bodies litter the deck. As does a train of gasoline everyone is trying their best to avoid while shooting at one another. 

For the first time, Harry catches sight of Loki in the flesh. 

A pinch of gleaming red hair is all Harry sees as Romanov bounds out of sight, a long shaft strapped to her shadow. 

Loki converges.

Ravens burst from his shadow. He’s twisted inside them. The raucous cawing hounds her retreat behind piles of crates. Fury, Coulson, and their men try to cover her. Feathers fly but the flock flows, narrowing on her agile figure rabbiting through bolts. 

Harry guns it down the catwalk before leaping over the rail. 

He careens into Loki’s Half-make, clutching inside that glint of green. He hauls Loki out of the shadow, the runes in his back gorging on the magic. 

Loki loses structural integrity of the spell, and they crash through crates. Wood explodes on impact, plastic wrapped supplies flying. They go sprawling in a tangle, fused, before simultaneously wrenching apart. 

Harry lands on toes and fingertips, bouncing off the balls of his feet with another stolen blade in thrusting grip. 

Loki catches his arm.

Harry drops the steel and draws the cold manticore spine from his boot with his left hand, slicing upwards. 

Loki rears backward bowing over his spine. He snaps back. To avoid a blow Harry presses inside his guard. They cinch and fold onto the floor. Loki’s superior strength bears down, trying to crush his skeleton. Harry contorts, relying on the cushioned discs between his vertebrae. He slithers out and tumbles over Loki’s head. Loki rolls back over onto his hands and feet, eying Harry with the new distance between them. 

With an oily smirk, Loki stands. In person, he’s tall and thin as a poplar, so pale he looks sick. A line of thin golden ichor opens on his chin where the manticore spine nicked him.

Feeling the sting, Loki touches the cut, pulling his hand away to look. 

“You’re an interesting thing. Little grackle.”

With a flick of his fingers, Loki throws three summoned knives at him.

Harry dodges beneath the first knife and bats away the other with the manticore spine and catches the third where it means to spear his foot. He shoulder throws the knife back at Loki, who banishes it mid-air.

His smirk grows, but his eyes are tight. “I don’t have time for you right now.”

“Whoever’s on other side of that scepter must be impatient.”

It’s a wild guess.

Loki’s eyes widen. 

Then Harry gets shot. 

It is a shattering like a giant took a burning knitting needle to Harry’s chest. He’s thrown back and everything blanks to wild pain. He can’t get the air to scream, succumbing under blinding agony.

He registers nothing but the pain until his head is grabbed by the hair. The scream comes out, mangled and blundering, and he can’t get his limbs to quit their fumbling. A gravity shift. White pain and vertigo. It takes a handful of seconds for his vision to clear. 

He follows the line of arm grasping his coat, holding him off his feet, along to Loki’s face. Loki is not focused on him, and Harry follows its line of sight further into the hangar. A figure wavers before coming into focus.

Bruce. He’s standing in hangar. Alone. Harry thinks he’s going to get shot before he realizes the gunfire has stopped.

Oh.

Loki is hanging Harry out the hangar doors.

The wind, now that he notices it, is swift, but the air cresting off the ship creates an eddy, spiraling in place. The ship’s losing altitude. 

Loki holds out his hand, the one not full of Harry.

Harry tries to concentrate. The pain is splintering. Focus. 

Fury’s dark figure stands part ways from Bruce’s untidy one. He has a long clothed object, and it occurs to Harry that Bruce is holding them all hostage because Loki is holding Harry. 

Fury unwraps the scepter and the blue glow of its not-a-gem. 

With a final glance at Bruce and the threat of carnage, Fury turns back to Loki. He might even look at Harry before he tosses the spear in an arc. 

Harry _focuses_.

The moment Loki reaches for the scepter, Harry surges forward and drops his weight. 

In a moment of weakness, anticipating the scepter, Loki staggers against the unexpected pendulum, torn between trying to regain his balance. He halfway turns-

-and Harry uses the downward spring of his own weight, bouncing at the end of the downbeat, ignoring the white hot _pain_ , folds in half, torquing his left leg up-

-Loki doesn’t react in time to block Harry’s calf from snagging against the back of his neck, from Harry uses Loki as a counter to level himself up, turning on an axel. 

Loki’s weight goes forward, fingers lose and-

-Harry comes up. 

The scepter smacks into his right hand.

He feels grey with nausea and pain, but he has no choice but to complete the complicated trajectory. He lands with a bloody, clumsy smear onto the hangar deck. Lacking breath and strength to tumble away.

He’s too close to Loki. He couldn’t make it. Not enough power to get as far as he needed. 

Bruce is running. He doesn’t see it or hear it. But he feels it in the metal shivering beneath him. Bones opening. Muscle spun from nothing but radiation and rage.

But Loki will reach him first. 

Harry tangles his weak arms around the scepter and throws himself away over the edge of the ship. 

Hulk roars. 

The sky steals direction, the sensation of freefall liberating. He’s not sure he can survive hitting the first wind current and opens his eyes to see how far behind Hulk is.

He’s coming over the end of the aircraft, the grey belly stretching out like a colossal whale. He doesn’t jump so much as tip directly out and leap downward, denting the deck. His palm open.

Harry has enough time to believe he’ll make it. 

But something black, a mass of crying ravens, springs out beneath him. 

Harry’s eyes widen as Loki dives under Hulk’s fall. 

Harry writhes as the first touch of feather, but he has no strength. Not even to keep hold of the scepter.

“No!” rips out of Harry, a gasp. 

He’s surrounded in pitch, cloistered. Wings close him in. He can’t see, but he knows. He knows Hulk will keep falling down. They’ve already missed each other.

He tries to scream, but nothing comes out.

Blood loss swallows him whole. 


	9. Get your own villain lair, Loki (Part 1)

Harry is surprised to wake. He remembers falling out of a battleship and being shot in the chest.

A rush of ill accompanies the rest of the memories, but he’s too sore to move. The sharp inhale he made is already poking jagged spokes at his sternum. He feels like he got hit by a lorry and patched by a sadistic child. 

It’s no use pretending to be unconscious. 

Natural light bathes the ceiling. A single light fixture dangles above his head from a vaulted beam. He’s laying on a table, stripped to his waist but not tied down.

Rising hurts terribly, but he inspects his chest. There is the tender rash-like burn of a rapid healing. A fresh scar looks like a star of Bethlehem right above his pec. The skin looks thin and sore, darkened by bruise. Rather than agony, it throbs. He presses down very gingerly. Blood wells but it doesn’t tear, like a weeping eye. The bone beneath gives a deep grumble of protest. He closes his eyes and lets the pain passes. He’s already getting used to it. 

He takes his fingers away and turns to look at Loki. He lounges on the L-shaped curve of an ivory leather sofa, his black-booted feet up on the arm. 

“Good. You’re awake. I was getting _bored_.” 

He swings his legs over and shoots up with unnatural grace.

Harry braces his elbow and begins the arduous task of leaning up straight. The room swims around him, but he breathes through it. His feet don’t reach the floor, but he can balance on his hands and his seat. When he lifts his head and opens his eyes, he is not surprised to find Loki close, only a handswidth away. 

His eyes are dark. Once again, Harry sees little Norse in his features. He’s practically corvid. Lips thin and nearly grey. There’s a mania, a not-all-present gleam of madness in the flagrant staring. If Harry didn’t know better, he’d say the god was sick. 

“The bullet ricocheted off your sternum,” Loki says. “Lodged right beneath your scapula.” His eyes are fixed, absent empathy, on the entry wound. “Very fortune you are.”

Loki glances up at him and smiles. It lacks warmth. It lacks glee too. Harry spies hatred, like a roiling pit of maggots, in the center of his false grin. 

This close, Harry can seen the sheen of something almost like sweat, giving his skin that grey undertone. The way his bangs cling just a touch with wet. The bruising under that impervious god-skin. 

The line the manticore spine drew on his chin is a thin crusting scab the color of resin. 

Loki menaces from between Harry’s legs, not touching. He doesn’t give off heat. The scepter is a still, subtler threat.

“Are you scared?” Loki asks. 

“Where’s my coat?” Harry asks back.

With a grin only a little less demented, Loki steps away. He summons Harry’s clothes — a pile of rags — but also, thankfully, some sterile, white bandages and athletic tape that Harry didn’t know Loki knew existed. He patches himself up. The wound doesn’t affect his range of motion other than in general, expected soreness. Loki is a crass medic but a knowledgable one. 

His kurta is beyond salvable, the undershirt beneath it rank with sweat stains and _else_. Fresh blood covering rusty blood. The coat, an ugly grey wrap-around that he made from lethifold skin, is more durable. It has managed to stay with him over the years on account of being hideous and only a tad haunted. It took getting shot better than Harry. The hole is still there, but it’s not even blood-stained. It probably ate it. 

“You are aware you smell,” Loki says. 

“Bathing has been high on my to-do list.” 

Harry shrugs on the coat, covering the too-bright bandaging, the myriad of bruises from getting knocked around by the rakshasa, and of course the other older scars, faded to smooth knots of brown, and the shimmer of tattooed branding on his back. He hops off the table, slow and careful.

Completely upright, the nausea of anemia hits like a freight train. It blacks out his vision and leaves a tang on his mouth. That too mercifully passes enough for him to stagger for the gleaming steel bar he spied. 

He dips a hand under the water first and splashes his face. It only stays lukewarm for barely a second before cooling. He slurps from the flow like an animal before feeling like he has the will or energy to search for a glass. 

The room is a condo. Like something a stock trader or investment manager might rent. It’s big. Bigger than any other muggle housing he’s been in. It’s also minimalist — black and whites fussing to slates and creams. A open party kitchen and a glass and wire mezzanine. Low rectangular seats for lounging. Hightop counters for uncomfortable socializing. It overlooks a muggle city, a grey bay, and skyscrapers. 

It’s not what he expected if he had bothered to expect anything at all. Loki is Old World, but… The way he talks, the tape — Harry’s beginning to wonder if Loki is even definable by worlds. 

Loki lets him raid the bar. 

It’s remarkably well stocked. He crams in cherries, avoiding the olives in case he dehydrates himself, and only barely remembers not to eat the peel on the oranges. He chugs tomato juice.

Since Loki is being suspiciously tolerant, Harry wipes his mouth on his sleeve and takes out the open bottle of gin. He holds it up in offering towards Loki. He’s answered with nothing but a lazy leer, so Harry picks up two shot glasses and wobbles into the living space. 

Navigating the low space to the furniture with a chest injury is taxing. He manages without grace. Loki meanwhile studies him. 

“These are pathetic delaying tactics. You cannot avoid the inevitable.”

Harry pours a shot glass to each of them. The cap makes a sliding metallic sound on the bottle as he twists it close. 

“Nothing is inevitable.” Not even Death sometimes. 

Loki ambles closer with that damn stick until he crosses the low table from him. 

“You,” Loki says, “bound to my will. Is inevitable.”

Harry takes the shot. He barely feels it.

“Nah.” He unscrews the bottle, pours another, screws it back. “It’s a choice. It’s always someone’s choice.”

Loki’s gaze is inscrutable. He sits. 

“You think you can stop me. How? By being clever?”

He smiles. It’s unkind. 

Harry swirls the liquid in his hand. “Something wicked this way comes,” he murmurs, singing remembered notes. He downs the shot with ease. 

Loki watches. 

Inevitable. Inevitability. 

If it is inevitable then why is _Loki_ stalling? Harry hasn’t had control of anything in this room since he woke up. Loki’s the one prowling, mocking, hesitating. If Harry’s theory about the scepter’s control and unconsciousness is true, then he could understand needing to wait for Harry to wake. But this _tolerance_ (patience?) implies something more. Something else. 

He pours another shot. Cap off. Cap on. And swallows it. It still tastes clear as water. Harry would need a lot more in his veins than this empty distilled grain to feel anything. The juniper berries leave something almost cleansing though. 

“How did you know?” Loki asks, his voice solemn, grin gone. “That the scepter was a conduit.”

“You ask,” Harry says, “because it’s inevitable that I go under. It won’t matter, in the long run. But we all remember something.”

Loki’s gaze is blank. Harry knows Loki doesn’t comprehend his babbling. 

“Is it inevitable that you’re here?” Harry asks. He asks it with another shot pressed to his lips, watching Loki, trying to divine what is happening to him. 

And for a moment, his brow furrows. Harry sees two answers hovering inside him, pulling in separate directions. 

“Yes.”

“Nope,” Harry says. Watching. Watching. “You have to drink.”

The glaze returns as does his smarmy smile. “I wasn’t aware we were playing a game.”

“I know,” Harry says. “But you’re only losing a little. You’ll win in the end, if it’s inevitable.”

Loki both laughs and sneers. He darts forward and takes the shot glass. He downs it.

“Weak swill.” He places the glass on the table, top down. “I hope you weren’t hoping I’d be allergic.”

A rising suspicion is becoming clearer.He pours them more shots. 

“You want me under the scepter. To control Hulk?” he muses.

Loki takes the drink without prompting this time. He salutes with it. 

“That’s not going to work how you hope it will,” Harry notes. 

“Oh please tell me why.”

Harry sips rather than swallows. 

“Do you find love to be a very calming emotion, Loki?”

Loki’s eyes have turned malevolent. “Don’t know. I’ve never been in love.”

Harry looks at him and doesn’t call out the very obvious lie. He thinks the fact that he doesn’t makes Loki even more insulted. 

“Love is reckless, world-defying. It bleeds everyone it touches, even the one holding it. Maybe especially them.”

“He cares for you,” Loki says. He sounds like he’s trying to reign back his control, but he doesn’t sound nearly as convinced. “He’ll do as you say.”

“Do the ones who love you do as you say?”

He sees rage ignite. It boils over his face, cutting the the slimy rictus of control off his features. Harry stands as Loki stalks around the table. In a second, Loki has kicked it. It flies across the room and strikes the glass wall with a crash and cascade of glass. The window cracks, a spiderwebbed imprint from impact, the frame dented. 

Harry retreats backwards up the steps of the shallow depression, watching Loki’s eyes fix on him like some kind of viper. He can’t balance himself and ends up lying on the slope of the steps, staring up at the rage on Loki’s face as the scepter swings in front of Harry. 

“Tell me,” Loki sneers. “Tell me how you pulled me out of my magic.”

Harry’s gaze doesn’t waver. Even now, he is not scared, knowing what it will cost him to evade the scepter’s influence. He’ll purge every memory out of his head before he gives anyone like Loki or whoever controls him access to the magical worlds here, or the Elder Wand. 

“In the birds?” Harry whispers.

Loki cants down, eyes wild, ringed blue and black. “Yes. Tell me.”

“No.”

For a second, Loki is blank with disbelief, his mouth open in a moue of complete astonishment, before he presses the scepter to Harry’s chest. It barely touches the bullet wound. Harry’s stomach clenches on a sound of aborted pain.

“You’ll tell me, or I’ll take it out of you.”

“Is that what happened to you?” Harry asks, soft as monkshood.

Loki stills again. His mind. His mind rucks and riots and spits, and the scepter’s blue glows incandescent, hemming him in. 

Loki isn’t given the opportunity to answer. 

— — —

A strong sound, like a jet, streaks by the windows. The glass and walls tremble. It’s followed by the strumming chords of a band, something electric hovering at the end of cacophony. 

Harry has to lean back on his elbows and stretch his neck to catch a glimpse of something lipstick-red landing on a gangplank out in the center of the tower. 

The music drops into an abrupt fade. Harry’s farsighted. Even without his glasses, he picks out the pinstripe suit before he recognizes Tony Stark’s figure ambling down the gangplank towards the condo, shedding machinery.

When he steps into the building — the glass doors sliding apart for him — Harry’s head is tilted all the way back, watching upside down from the surprisingly cold floor. 

“Yikes,” Tony Stark says. “Am I interrupting? Actually, I don’t care, seeing as how it’s _my_ tower. How you doing, Buttercup?”

“Er.” Harry realizes belatedly that he’s asking if he’s compromised. He can’t think of a code-like way to answer back. “ _Er._ ”

“Brain scrambled like a normal human being, gotcha. Some kinky spear-play there, Home-wrecker.”

Loki sighs, long and deep. 

Harry blinks and the end of the scepter is replaced by Loki’s hand. He can’t help a pained grimace as he’s hauled up. His legs fold, vision circling for a terrible moment. He has no choice but to hold onto Loki’s arm as it holds him up as it passes. 

Loki shoots him a disgusted look.

“Replace the blood I lost if you don’t want me woozy,” Harry grumbles.

Loki releases him. The relief is short-lived as Loki snaps his fingers and replicated blood fills his stomach. Harry leans over and disgorges a river of red over the pristine white couch. He gags on the violence and hurls again, feeling vaguely ripped in half. It doesn’t stink half as bad as real puke, having no time to mix with the bile in his stomach.

Leaning up, Harry does realize that his head is clearer. Loki did actually replicate blood inside his cells. 

Still, he glances at Loki, wiping his mouth, and says, “Gross.”

Loki lifts his hand threateningly. “Complain more. I’m sure I can turn your stomach inside out.”

Harry fetches the bottle of gin, which did not get kicked with the table, and simply drinks from the bottle, washing his mouth out, and spits.

“You’re getting my cleaning bill,” Stark snipes. “Or I guess your brother is. I don’t think you’ll have a lot of access to bank accounts in spiffy alien prison.”

“Is your plan to pester me to compliance?” Loki asks. 

“Nah,” Stark sing-songs. The upper level also has a bar, where Stark fiddles with glassware and tumblers until he has a pretty mojito. He takes a sip with a hum of appreciation. “I’m going to threaten you.”

Loki laughs. “You should have kept your suit on. You have nothing, and I have the monster’s pet.” 

Harry avoids Loki’s first reach on principle but grunts in surprise when Loki tangles a hand in his hair to drag him over. 

“You are like bad touch city right now,” Stark says, something dark in his jovial tone. “This coming from a rich white guy, you’re creeping me the fuck out.”

“I am losing patience. If I can’t use you, maybe I should just kill you.”

The scepter moves under Harry’s chin.

“I mean, if you want a giant green-”

“What happened to your inevitability?” Harry asks quietly as Stark continues to talk.

Loki glowers down at him. 

“Stalling is no use,” he says, turning to Stark.

Caught mid-sentence, Stark stops and reorients smoothly. “Not stalling. Threatening.”

“Yes. With your captain lost out of time, your poor mislaid beast, your wounded assassins, and my stupid brother - somewhere, if he survived where I dropped him. And of course, you.” He looks the man over. “You might be more pathetic than this waste of air. Snapping at the heels of all those shinier, stronger, better people. Clever as you are, but never trusted. Because you’re too spoiled and selfish and bitter. With your ugly, ugly heart.”

“Yeah,” Stark says, letting him finish. “I guess we’re all of those things. But you really don’t get it.”

“Oh.” The tip of the scepter falls from under Harry’s chin so he can gesture with it. “Please enlighten me.”

“When we’re wounded, when we’re lost, that’s when we really get our shit together.” He looks at Loki with eyes like a teed dragon. “We’re crude, irreverent risen apes who bull our way through trauma because we’re too much of fucking assholes to give up. No matter how many of us you kill, how many of us you think you’ve cowed into submission, in our lowest, we take all of our rage and we weaponize it. There’s no way you come out on top. You don’t get a crown. You don’t get a throne. You get the bruise we’re gonna make when we kick your ass off our planet.”

Harry’s ears ring with the force of conviction in Stark’s words, each one carved in permanence. Like a forge. 

“Nothing but empty words,” Loki says. “No army. No plan-”

“ _Uhp!_ I say winging it is a plan,” Stark interrupts. 

Loki sighs, bored. 

Harry tightens his hold on the bottle. 

Dragging Harry stumbling at his side, Loki swans to Stark, who turns, making a better target of his chest. He takes another sip from his cocktail. 

“I wonder how long it will take you to tear your friends apart,” Loki says.

Stark _lets_ Loki tap his chest.

_tink_

Loki looks down at the scepter. Harry holds his breath. 

“That usually works.”

“Performance issues?” Stark asks. “I would say I know how it is but-”

Loki drops Harry to grab Stark by the throat. 

Harry bounces up and swings the bottle against the back of Loki’s head. He releases it so the shards don’t impale his hand. Gin and glass splatter the god’s black hair, dribbling down his neck and collar. 

Loki freezes. 

Stark’s eyes are wide, his lips curved with amazed laughter.

Loki throws him clean across the room. 

Stark flies with a yelp. 

“You’ve outlasted my patience,” he snarls at Harry. 

The cracked window explodes. 

Harry tries to block the grab, but Loki knocks his arm away easily, blocks his leg coming up. He lifts him by the coat collar and forces him back. Harry’s fingers scramble uselessly over the hold. Harry gets his feet between them, but Loki is solid, not to be distracted again.

Once more, Loki holds him out over the bowl of the world. 

The wind snakes out around him. Convention currents and the buildings heat tug and pull. 

“No one’s going to catch you this time,” Loki smirks.

He opens his hand. 

Harry plummets.

He can see his body in the glistened mirrored glass of the building as he tumbles wildly, churning in the currents. The horizon turns, twisting in and out the fanged steel teeth of the city. 

“Hartson!” 

Harry looks down his toes then up his chin, trying to straighten. Iron Man plummets after him, the sun gleaming off Gryffindor gold and red. 

Harry turns on his belly to increase the drag, trying desperately not to get smacked into the building.

Oh... That’s...

It’s like a Wronski Feint. 

Except there are cars and asphalt instead of grass. 

He feels Iron Man’s arm against his waist. Harry tucks himself into the armor’s bulk, wrapping legs around waist, arms around neck, so Stark can free his hands to lever their dive. 

Stark torques to create centripetal force to press Harry into him. He opens ailerons. The G-force almost steal Harry away. 

Stark rolls upright.

Pedestrians screech into a funnel of sound, honking horns and angry tires. It is a mass of color and shapes and air bouncing off very solid bodies that could send them piling into the very hard street. Harry tries to make himself small. To let Stark fly. 

Finally, Stark gets them free. A harrowing handful of seconds before they vault up against gravity. His boots and the smaller jets in his suit burn, correcting. They erupt from the snarl of roads and awnings and fire escapes into smoother empty sky.

Only then does Harry opens his eyes. 

They are flying over the city. Metal juggernauts glare daring at the open heavens. Clouds whirl opulently above, uncaring. Heat bounces and Harry’s body threatens to sag into the emptiness below him. 

Harry holds tightly around Stark’s neck and pulls himself up. The armor wobbles, followed by a staticky sound of Stark’s protest before Harry crawls up his shoulder. For a second or two, his feet dangle dangerous down the drop, only half of him leveled, clinging for space on the smooth metal.

Then, Stark dips them. Harry gets leverage, hauls himself up, and splays out across Stark’s back, spinning awkwardly for a moment while Stark levels them back out on the repulsors. 

His legs dangling around Iron Man’s head, Harry lays down. 

His heart is thudding. It happened too quickly for his mind to really comprehend the danger, but his heart (what’s left of it) knows. It warbles weakly, wanting, before even that fades to the nothingness that warps him. 

The wind whips around him. He smells the metal of the buildings baking in the May sunlight, the grease Stark uses on the armored suit, the charred smell of the repulsors, and the filthy scent of the distant bay. He doesn’t look at the sky.

Stark spies a landing space in a park. Harry knows the moment he does with all the odds and ends of steering strategizing together to direct what should be a terribly cumbersome thing. 

Stark flies like he’s spent endless hours in the sky. Not like he’s controlling a suit but with the intuitiveness of knowing these air currents. Hundreds of meters above the ground, air is more unpredictable, free to pull and plunge and sweep them towards far away continents. The Iron Man armor, which should be clunky and dispossessed, flies better than long-winged birds, adjusting to micro-expressions of the atmosphere with the power of an albatross but the fleetness of a sparrow. 

Harry feels when they approach landing. Stark decreases speed. Harry prepares to make a jump, but Stark cants himself subtly. Harry first thinks he’s counterbalancing the weight distribution before he realizes Stark wants him to stay. Stark veers vertical, using hand blasters to pull them upright like he had at the strip on the tower. He lowers the power of the blast in increments until they can drop down on sod.

Harry hops off his shoulders. He stumbles, more affected than he assumed, and falls on his arse on soft turf. The air is punched out of him. He can’t breathe, and it takes a pathetic crawl of seconds to remember how to control himself. 

Stark’s steps are _heavy._ He lifts the visor, and it really is a man in there, surrounded by a miracle of machinery, not magic. 

“You alright?”

It’s the first real question Harry thinks Stark has asked him. Unadorned by frippery. 

He doesn’t answer, not sure what it would be, but he does look up at the suit. Focusing on it seems to distract from his perilous state of being.He doesn’t know why he’s so scattered.

Stark, seeing his regard, poses and whips out a frankly embarrassing grin. He stops though when Harry tries to stand up, offering a hand and arm. 

Inexplicably, Harry takes it, careful not to let the components pinch his skin. 

“I owe you,” Harry says.

“Psst. Nah. I’m trying this whole ally-gig. I think we’re _supposed_ to help each other.”

He says it light, joking, but Harry reads the real concern behind it

The grin slides. It gets tucked away somewhere else.

“You, uh. You should probably go to a hospital.”

“Can’t.”

“Yeah. Look, there’s only so much SHIELD-y secrets that-”

“I don’t have insurance,” Harry corrects. “And I think I’m illegal.”

Stark stares at him. Then, he laughs.

“Yeah, I can-” he chuckles, “I can see how that would be a problem. I can arrange that. No sweat. I mean, I got all the money-”

Stark cuts off yet when Harry curves his hand around the glow in the center of the armor’s chest plate. He doesn’t touch it, cupping around like he expects the light to spill into his hand. 

_In what furnace was thy brain? What the anvil? What dread grasp dare its deadly terrors clasp?_

“Hulk?” he asks. 

“We haven’t gotten word,” Stark says. “But he’ll come.”

Harry nods. He’s not dead. Just delayed. 

A shadow crosses over them. The wind has picked up, and both of them turn instinctively towards the way they came. 

The sky looks swollen. Something abscessed hangs over the tallest tower. 

“I should get back. If you’re done being the damsel-in-distress.”

“You’re literally in shining armor,” Harry notes. He takes a step back. “Should I give a kiss?”

“Better not. My girlfriend would stab me. Maybe you. Oh!” He makes some elaborate gesture and a panel opens. It’s at his groin and Harry raises a brow. “Just wait.” Stark kind of struggles awkwardly with the thick fingers of his gauntlet through the gap towards his leg.

It looks tremendously inappropriate. Stark performs a leg jingling dance before he pulls up with an aha! of triumph.

“Gonna have to fix that,” he remarks as he holds out a small bauble. 

Harry stares before resigning himself to inspecting it. About the size of a snail and flesh colored. Stark wiggles it impatiently and Harry has to take his gauntlet hand to get him to stop. The man goes still like a horse about to rear but Harry only needs the additional two seconds to decide, highly unlikely anyway, that probably it’s not malevolent. Or something disgusting. It’s made of malleable silicon, squishy around a hard capsule. 

When he takes it, Stark comes unstuck and takes two clomping steps back out of Harry’s range. 

“In case, you know, you need it,” Stark says. “Can’t hurt.” Arguing a point Harry isn’t protesting. “Well.” The visor comes down. “Tootles,” he says, before taking off with a blast that chars the grass. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Who love me for not leaving it at that page break?
> 
> Also, Tony totally only made the codpiece easy to remove without an assembly line because he's a slutty idiot.


	10. Interlude - Tony (Part 1)

**Interlude**

**.:Tony:.**

“ _Tootles_ , Stark. What the fuck?” Tony wonders to himself, thinking five steps ahead towards the battle that’s going to take place. 

Captain Freezer Burn comes on the comm. “How is he?”

“Not mind-whammied. Think Loki magicked his bullet wound up.” He doesn’t mention the position he found them in, or Harry vomiting blood. 

“How nice of him,” Barton comments.

“Loki threw him out a window again. That’s two for two. I’d say, since Loki didn’t know I had another suit, that was a pretty clear murder attempt.”

“Still can’t dismiss that he might be an accomplice,” Itty-Bitty notes. 

Stark snorts. “You didn’t see them.”

“What didn’t I see?” 

There’s a dangerous edge to Romanov’s tone, too neutral to be trusted. 

Capsicle cuts them off. He sounds winded. “Iron Man, um.”

“I see it.”

“Well fuck,” Hawkguy adds. Terror mixed with excitement. 

“Everyone ready?” Capslock asks. 

Barton laughs. “Not even a little. Let’s do it,”

“Took the words out of my mouth, Birdbrain.”


	11. Flying (Part 1)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry, guys! I had to cut this chapter in half because it was too long. I had to hurriedly do some last minute edits as well since I'm trying to do my best to update a chapter a day. I'll warn you when we are coming up towards the end of part I. I have so many chapters (what have I done with my life?) but am having a bit of an issue getting a transition between part I and part II so there is probably going to be an updating break in between while I organize. 
> 
> I hope you still enjoy it! 
> 
> (warning for some violence in this chapter, and some non-descriptive upchucking)

Harry uses a pipe and a window ledge to scale a sandstone building to watch the Tesseract open. 

A downwelling current spills into the lower stratosphere above Stark Tower. The air sizzles with static. Harry can see the convergence zone, where the Tesseract struggles to bend the axels of space to loop together. 

Strong winds smelling of charge lash the streets, a bell of quick building pressure. Some pedestrians yelp as skirts lift. Hats and newspaper tumble away. People flood into storefronts and down subway stairs, clinging under scaffolding to escape. A few crouch in the unmoving traffic. 

The portal doesn’t open. It bursts. 

The sky pops like a bubble. The black vacuum of space pours inside it, howling. 

Its size hollows the heart, so massive in carves up inside and eats. Harry’s pulse lurches into his ears.

Magicians have domesticated this. When they tidy their alleys between crevices, tuck their houses between the neighbors’ azaleas. In hold-all handbags and vanishing cabinets and trunks as deep as dungeons. They domesticate a dog from this wolf. 

The Confederation should be here. This is from beyond the mundane world.

Then the first wave of invaders come, and the screams and explosions and stampedes start.

— — —

The stuff Chitauri have inside them is a thin black ichor that smells like rotten vegetables and diesel. Not viscous like real blood. It’s oily and pitted. 

Harry lights the gasoline trail right into the cap of the white Chevy. It blows, taking off half the face of one of the five pack of roving foot soldiers. A block down, two firefighters finish removing a child from a crushed car. The soldiers pursue Harry down the smoking gridlocked street. Plasma blasts windshields as he passes.

Harry slides into a basement pub.

Somewhere in the distance, Hulk roars. 

He streaks through water puddled to his calves and hops onto the tables as the Chitauri follow him down. He glides over the bar, dunking down under the wood. Whatever they are shooting breaks the mirrored backwash and the rack of bottles. Glass goes flying. Harry ducks his head, covers his face. He hears them wade into the water. 

Sound is jumbled with watery movement, their sibilant breathing, and small far-off detonations, but he hears the groan of wood as one clenches the bar. 

Squished along the shelf, Harry takes the long extension and the hair dryer he nicked from the salon down the block. After a split-second whir, Harry drops it into the water.

The place fills with a garbled screech. Harry depresses the button on a blender and knocks that in the water too, the sound almost enough to hear over the rage-filled screaming. Something pops, like oil in a fire. It smells like grease and burning keratin. 

A series of dangerous metallic clicks, something bangs in a low tone as vocal cords sizzle. Then, something explodes. A shockwave pounds the back of the bar paneling, followed by a wall of heat that hits the broken backwash and floods into the niche. Harry holds his breath and protects the vulnerable liquid in his eyes by closing them and ducking his head further into his lethifold coat. His skin blisters. 

It smells foul, and nothing is making sound but the belated sprinkler system. Wadding his hand around a towel, he yanks out the cable extension.

Rubber has melted. The wires black. 

Avoiding the pool, Harry twists (ignoring every stab of pain his abused body makes) and folds back onto the top of the counter. 

Water scampers sporadically from the twisted pipes lining the ceiling. 

The pub is demolished. Some of the booths are on fire and bodies, seared through with seared sores around their ports, crocodile mouths slack-jawed, litter the floor. The canons mounted in place of arms on two of them had presumably overheated and discharged. It tore through bionics and organics alike, leaving grey-pink slabs of leftover bodies and bristles of glimmering fibrous connections. 

Harry looks. 

He commits it to memory, not sure if these are _people,_ if they have _souls._ Humans, the patterns of their lives, come easy to him, but for others, it is always a struggle, something he has to learn, and this is neither the place nor the time. 

He avoids touching the standing water until he is perched again on the stoop. 

Outside, the sky is still swarming with them. They have tactical advantage in their air support — razing streets, firing high up into the buildings. Harry’s not sure if the Coast Guard has deployed any aircraft. Coulson and Rogers have organized the ground, an emergency evacuation guerrilla affair aided by the sniper suppression fire of whatever agents they’ve stuck up on rooftops. Iron Man, Hulk, and Thor have focused their efforts on tackling the leviathans spewing the endless swarm of troops. 

Harry’s bastardized bait-pursues, leading troops away from recovery units, is ineffective. Stopgaps.He’s also tiring, body losing responsiveness far too early in the firefight. It’s a problem. 

Harry tracks a chariots hurtling out of the sky. The snipers have downed a few, this one close enough to follow as it crashes into a Dior store. Its pilot acquired an arrow in its eye. 

The chariots resemble the type of monstrosity born when a Harley Davison fucks a velociraptor, more torture device than aircraft. The body tips out of the cab with liberal prodding. It slinks arse over teakettle over the side of the craft and flops indignantly on the floor.

Harry studies the interior.

None of this is made for humans. Wicked jacks spiked with needles creating an Iron Maiden of a piloting sheath. Harry doesn’t have the biology, but that rarely stops him anymore. 

Magic doesn’t flow through him anymore. He can’t… connect to that infinite source, tap into the wellspring of a supernova safely circulated through a wand or staff or what have you. Can’t do that anymore. Can’t rely on emotion.

But what Harry has in abundance is _will_. 

It had taken years to understand, to re-structure everything he was taught about magic. But he has it.

And it happens like this. 

“ _Scire_.” 

His senses extend. The language of the craft is one of neat ends. Of orders conveyed through sub-visible waves, on filaments of silicon. Harry memorizes the pattern, reshapes his thoughts to mimic the clean conformity. He separates himself, performing the complex multitask of electrical external communication and his own internal somatic ones. 

It feels eerily familiar to suffocation, but it’s fine. It’s safe. 

Human brains are very good at adapting incomprehensible data into _something_ legible. Not always useful. Usefulness takes practice and training. 

Harry sorts out the chariot’s controls and functions. As he sinks into the seat, unconsciously dismissing the needle-jacks, he translates the mapping system from infrared and sonar to a special section of neurons, not entirely dissimilar to warding. 

Discomfort starts up like a tingle, a smack to the funny-bone all over his body. Not important. Disregard. The aches and pains of his human body dissolve to background data, no longer a sensation. 

Likewise, he renders the telecommunication input into readable script, dropped directly to his mind. Then he does a systems search, severs the chariot’s control function from hive, muffles the positional broadcast without disconnecting the navigational feed so he’ll still have access to the other chariot locations, and then just takes a minute to parse the fliers’ flight protocols. 

He purses his lips and exhales. 

Connecting to something so _interconnected_ feels like ants crawling all over his brain. But the chariot is a machine without sentience. It wants to do as it’s told, magical manipulation no different than any other. 

Yay. 

Subsumed in the machine, still carefully separating his senses from his organic body (which is like juggling a dozen eggs with every direction happening all at once), Harry tries to operate the chariot. 

_This is the worse idea I’ve ever had_ , Harry thinks. 

Harry then smacks the butt of the chariot into the ceiling, knocking him further into the seat, loses his grip on the handlebars, lights a mannequin on fire, and skids out into the road like the world’s worst driver’s ed student. 

\- — — — -

The vessel leaps. His gut is somewhere in his arse, the G-force pinning him to the seat. He clips scaffolding, mutters “sorry” at the building behind him, and tries to _juggle non-Euclidean eggs_ and drive at the same time. 

In operation, the data is much more puke-inducing than expected. He has to make real-time adjustments as he’s flying, moving blind for an uncomfortably long stretch of time in an open battlefield and city with closely packed buildings. His attention _fractals_. 

He pukes out of pure vertigo before he even notices his body’s need to do so. Bile goes up his nose. After finding and clinging to an aerial map, he shoots upward, needing to get out of the narrow spaces more than he needs to avoid weaponsfire. Away from the jumble of impact warnings, Harry spreads his thoughts out, reading and dismissing data from different systems while getting a better handle on manual flight, now he’s off the synced hive network.

Amid the oncoming details of the other chariots, Harry clocks Iron Man. 

He flies like a damn hornet, able to turn on a dime and fire with his repulsors on his followers. He can bank on his thrusters and shoot up out of their targeting, flit in and out. It is impressively dexterous. 

Hulk leapfrogs between buildings, whaling on the ships like a gorilla with unholy wrath.

Thor is at the aperture, funneling lightning to the ships still trying to come through. 

The situation seems both more and less dire up here. 

The aft guns on the chariot have a 30 degree x-axis turret, presumably to make space for the flight cells. The limited agility explains why the chariots typically have a gunner on the back. 

Harry’s not sure he can control the weapons. Enough to fire but not to aim. 

Mapping positions and the others’ strategy, Harry falls deeper into the internal systems of the aircraft, leaving a narrow thread back to his body. _Options_ open. He can _hear_ the Chitauri moving through the landscape of the city, acquiring targets, orchestrating the details of their widespread demolition which isn’t as thoughtless as expected. 

Harry does what he does best. 

Stick his nose in it. Attract attention. And utterly fail to die in the thick of the chaos. 


	12. The Never-Ending Day (Part 1)

They do not know how to deal with a rogue flier. A flurry of bewildered Q&As follow his darting path as he jumbles their comms, disrupts their flight paths, and carries false orders down to the troops. The intricate messaging system falls apart with one link in the chain broken. The Chitauri aren’t build for independent or creative thinking. Internal sabotage is entirely alien to them. 

Finally, someone up the chain of command with a measure of intelligence performs a system search. Harry evades the tag before he severs the link. Restricted to infrared readings, Harry edges around a building. He thrusts the front cell, flipping upside down in enough time to careen into the gunner on the back of a chariot shooting down the street. 

Harry feels the impact through the collision warning more than the thud the body made at the bow of the aircraft. He stalls the cells, losing enough altitude to fall 180º under the agitated cruiser trying to turn and hare away. 

He’s out of sight, camouflaging in a swarm of fliers when he detects a strange heat signal coming from inside one of the middle floors of the skyscrapers. There is a knot of foot-soldiers pursuing a red humanoid blob belting it towards the windows.

Harry changes trajectory and slows to pass under the floor, timing the impact with the plunge as the body barrels out of the wall of glass. Harry adjusts for the additional weight, and shoots away from the scene. 

Harry can’t feel his passenger, completely blind to the area behind him, as he tries to make safe distance, and realizes abruptly that he’s not connected to his vocal cords to warn them he’s not Chitauri. 

Harry reconnects to his hearing in enough time to hear Steve Rogers go, “Oh.”

He suffers losing some navigation to remember the way to speak with his body and only to artfully say, “Hi.”

He hears Rogers give a small huff of suppressed laughter as air whips them.

“Thanks for the lift.”

“Asphalt hurts,” Harry acknowledges. 

“How the devil are you flying?” Steve asks more amazed and intrigued than alarmed. 

“Er,” Harry replies. 

Thankfully, Harry doesn’t have to finish as Steve suddenly jerks behind him, a sensation of his grip leaving the seat back, and snarls, “Off! Get off the building!” 

Harry scans automatically and notes a skyscraper, cracked in half by a leviathan, the collapsing fuck-tonne of debris that will demolish more than half block, and the tiny blip of human red riding the roof of it. 

The other fliers, Iron Man is across the bay, and Thor is at the perimeter of the portal.

Harry changes direction. He banks hard left and cuts up. Rogers grips the seat to stay on. 

Unfortunately, his abrupt maneuvering alerts two chariots, who immediately tag him.

“Damn,” Harry mutters, flat.

“What?” Steve asks, voice nearly stolen by velocity and wind.

“Tagged,” Harry informs. “Have to focus.”

That’s all he can convey before he has to remove himself from his senses again. The feel of the wind and the sun dissolves, sonar and infrared feeding into his brain. 

He pushes the speed, dipping and dodging to avoid the Chitauris’ targeting. The insane figure on the skyscraper clears the edge of the roof and goes sliding down the side, glass rapidly buckling beneath them. The top of the skyscraper hits the adjacent building, and the two towers begin to fall apart in a stack of twining metal and ruptured glass. 

Harry registers the tilt of balance as Steve reaches over the port side. Harry flips the vehicle, having to cut the engines to sail over the side of the tower. The red figure leaves his horizon, but something collides with them, adjusting their course and speed.

Harry corrects. He doesn’t have time or power to warn his passengers as he cuts the understern cell, pumps the arse and tips them down. They clear the sky-side of the falling building. Harry senses a blip and ducks plasma fire with an awkward steer. It parallels them to the side of the tower, running them towards gravity. Harry has no choice but to lean in. The wind tries to flatten them to the building, resisting Harry’s control. 

Fire follows them down. 

Harry hopes his passengers stay on. 

As they break the side, Harry cut the front cells and _sloops_. His stomach and skeleton fall up, against his bracing. His passengers collide hard against back of his seat, enough that Harry feels the ricochet of the motion and hard hand on his shoulder. Harry fires the bow cells, lurching them ground-side before he turns them back up. They shoot backward under the gutted belly of the disintegrating building.

Harry’s senses slide between human and machine, reaching for the ephemeral instinctive data of wind and shadow against his skin. The screaming behind him escalates volume and pitch, yanked along with their dodges. The infrared instruments in the chariot lack the precision of battle-honed and quidditch-bred skill. Too clumsy, too late as light and shadow and motion weave with the tracking scale. 

The scream begins to alternate with whoops and “ _fuck!fuck!fuck!fuck!fuck!fuck!_ ” buoyant against the fatality of multiple collisions and the slow-eclipsing sliver of light. 

The top of the tower clips the sheared tower on the other side of the street, and the steel frame twists. Ten seconds under it, and the chariot’s maneuvering beginning to break against his demands. The cells reach the end of their angles, threatening to shatter. Overheating flares warning. Everything judders with force. 

They shoot out.

Free of the threat of being flattened, Harry increases speed to get them out of range of the collapse. He wrangles the cells into their more standard formations but he can feel them damaged. The machine shivers beneath his seat. 

Now he’s been tagged, he’ll be found again once one of the fliers attempts a lock anymore. He needs to abandon the aircraft. 

Still flying backwards, Harry cants the chariot. A startled yelp and another creak of his seat responds as his passengers cleave to the vessel. Harry spins them back around forward-facing. Quicker and more efficient than a U-turn would have done. He plots a route that won’t get him locked towards cover.

“Hey, excuse me!” the falling man screams in his ear. 

“Hush.”

“Did he just hush me?” 

Harry ignores him. 

“Can you get us up to the tower?” Rogers’ voice replaces him. 

Harry hums. Both of them are being very distracting and flying with the unconventional power of the _Scire_ is difficult enough without trying to get locked on that unhelpful tag. 

Rogers talks but Harry tunes him out. He can’t get his senses quite submerged in the programming again. _Scire_ was certainly not meant to be used this way, and he can feel it starting to burn. Glimpses of electricity shooting through neurons that are trying valiantly to remain human. Other parts of him feel locked in. The constant edge of _ow-danger_ is fast approaching _hazardous_ and _he’s still in the air._

A hand clenches on his shoulder and Harry flinches so hard the chariot judders like a missed heartbeat. The grip retreats quickly, but it’s an effort for the blankness whiteness of unresolved pain, like a loose charge throughout his body, peals back to Rogers’ mumbled apologies and concerns. 

“You don’t look good,” comes through bloated, marbled with greasy oscillations (which, what even does that mean?). 

There’s more but Harry doesn’t hear it. He was right that this would be a terrible idea. 

“-off and make it to the Tower?” comes in again, strung through with… a taste? Something he doesn’t have the space in his thoughts to work out.

It’s _Steve_ , if Steve were made of graphite caught at the back of his tongue, like varnish and the fading vapors of something horrible he doesn’t talk about. And Harry doesn’t understand what he’s said but he agrees to get him to stop talking and then Steve isn’t on the aircraft anymore. 

Just the unnamed man left, whose grip on Harry’s shoulder is both firmer and gentler, who tells Harry, “30º up, bear right.”

The hand is gone, but the presence remains. The man settles into position behind him as Harry swallows the instructions with gratitude. 

He adds other orders, and the charred scent of burning fuel, puffs of heat and smell, bursts of sound and screeching metal make eddies at the edge of his senses. Harry laps up the snapped orders, focused entirely there as he keep the vessel airborne, angling towards the man’s target. 

They ascend towards a nest of Chitauri, Stark Tower the only tower remaining under that raw nub. 

“Hey, Thor, think you can give us some lightning?” the man asks into his comm. 

The Aesir obliges. Harry’s heart tightens as the air pressurizes, a thistle of pain before lightning strikes a hole in the guard. 

Harry doesn’t have to listen this time to orders. Sensing the end of his need to hold the _Scire_ , he flies with a bit more aggression, pushing the battered cells to their last limits. Explosions go off blindly around him. The whittling hum of vehicles blazing by. 

They burst through the pocket of space where the end of the Chitauri line writhes. An aft cell jags and bursts, careening them sideways, but Harry gets them landed, cutting the fuel and thrust.

It feels like they slam on the deck, momentum carrying them screeching several yards after the machine goes dark. 

Jarred and wounded, Harry loses his grip.

It must be several minutes later when he comes to. The soreness in his muscles and taste of acid tell him he’s had a minor seizure. He’s tilted on his side, as much as he can be while still inside the cab. His vision is stabbed through with vague synesthesia. He can’t _see_ the man leaning over him. He _tastes_ the world-winds of his skin, the oil of his eyes, and thick pomegranate rind of his mouth. Impressions of psychic scents that firm at the back of his tongue, that muddle to a sludge of _grey_ , and though the man is looming right in front of him, shielding him from the open sun with chest and shoulders and arms that give the impression of large and sharp and alertness, he can’t see the man’s face.

“Come on,” Harry _smells_ , dizzily. “Can’t stay out here all day. There are aliens in the fucking sky. With weird cannon-y things that shoot acid or some shit. Gonna get glooped if we don’t move. _Please_ move.”

“Grey?” Harry asks. 

“Great. Language. Let’s get up and out of the open, shall we? What do you mean _grey_?”

The sky behind him is secreting even more _taste_ that seems to pulse and jump out at him violently. And the man rests on it, in it. Wavering iridescence of metallic fumes in his crest, like a… “Pigeon.”

“…pigeon? A fucking pige- I’m _a hawk_! I’m Hawkeye you fuckin- No!” he says abruptly. “He called me a pigeon! A fucking pigeon! Those are rats with wings. Fuck you. Fuck all of you, and especially you, you little shit.”

Despite the colorful language, the _taste of copper_ extracts Harry from the chariot with more care than expected. They tumble out and Harry’s legs go a different way than his torso, which is honestly rather rude of them. 

The _taste of copper_ is mumbling with his arm around Harry’s shoulders, pressing him to his chest while they crouch-run across the deck. 

“Thank you,” Harry remembers to say. 

“Shit,” the taste of copper calls him grumpily and then, “Hey, stay with me,” as Harry slumps. 

“Where els’I’d go?” He thinks of the long fall down. “Splat squish.”

“Wow, cut _that_ out,” says the smell of salt. “Try to focus, okay? I don’t know what you gotta do but pull it together. I can’t babysit you right now.”

Harry can’t think of any better response than a raspberry, which he blows in the color’s direction.

The taste laughs a memory of clementines. 

“Man, I’m gonna fucking hate it if you’re with Loki.”

“Loki’s cock.”

“I hope you mean Loki is a cock,” the taste says and pulls back an arm to nock and draw an arrow on a black bow… Harry can’t determine whether or not that is real. 

More or less shielded, Harry tackles a number — it is surprisingly (worryingly) hard to think of one — and counts down from it, finding his breathe. 

His body, recognizing the meditation, falls quiet. It remains difficult to wrestle his thoughts into their rightful shape but in the way it is difficult to reach a top shelf not bend a steel beam. Every second he spends timing his heartbeat, the more the chariot’s pattern of processing unravels from his own, an overextended rubber band falling back tired and hurt to its original mold. 

Ow. 

Ow ow ow.

He was so stupid. This was so stupid of him to have done. Why? It hadn’t even been necessary.

At zero, the pain is at tolerable levels (though damn he’s grody with fluids). He opens his eyes and focuses on the deck. A litter of persons in SHIELD black are thrown about the surface, only some dead.

Romanov, a person and not a horrifying display of tastes and smells, stands just a little ways over a glowing hourglass machine holding the Tesseract, too close to the volatile object to be a target. It roils inside and out. It is painful to watch. Reality collapsing and funneling in on itself in a way that hurts the brain. The power spun from the top of the hourglass is so fine as to be nothing but a needle-thin shimmer before blooming into the impossible multi-winged shape of the portal. 

She holds the scepter, neither Loki nor any other of his compromised agents in sight. 

The man, so much like the taste of copper and wind, is towards the golden end of caucasian. Crooked Greek nose, flat cheeks, weak lips, thin scars, and grey eyes watered with age that look directly up at Romanov as she speaks. 

“We have a problem.”

“What, another one? Oh, fucking balls of _shit_.”

Harry glances over the bay in the direction of the man’s gaze. His weakened mind rebels, throwing him back, rapidly blinking, into the closer vicinity. 

He has to struggle with tears. “Was that...?”

“It’s a nuke,” the man snarls. “Those _bitches_.”

Harry’s the only one of them not gifted with a comm link……… Wait.

Harry fumbles in his pocket and presses the bauble Stark gave him into his ear. The silicon conforms to his ear. The sound comes on immediately after a bright pip. 

“… _one way_ ,” Rogers’ voice ends.

“ _I figured_ ,” Stark responds, bright but insincere. “ _But do you have any other idea of where to put this?_ ” 

Harry speaks over the chatter. “What’s happening?”

“Oh, _NOW he uses it!_ ” Stark’s voice explodes on the channel. 

“ _He’s putting the nuke in the portal,_ ” Rogers explains, clipped. 

“Thor?” Harry asks

“ _I got it, Bedhead_ ,” Stark says.

Harry looks up at the portal. 

The Chitauri had the huge leviathans to force themselves through the upwelling drafts. All the air being sucked in and turned over, it is a treacherous, lethal whirlpool. Iron Man, the size of one man, doesn’t have the firepower to force itself back through that. 

“No,” Harry says.

“ _Look. It’s just simple-_ ”

“You,” Harry says, pointing to the coppery man. “Grapple?”

“Not long enough to-”

“Chariot’s got a tow.”

“ _I’m gonna do this-_ ” 

“And no one is stopping you,” Harry says at he stomps to the chariot.

He has to reorient mid-stride to counter the unexpected tipping of his inner ear. He stumbles into more than finds the forward panel, dented from plowing into crap. Harry nearly cuts his fingers in the attempt to pry it open. The copper-man gets a lever, and together, they jimmy it open enough for Harry to reach his arm inside it.

“ _Not that I don’t appreciate the effort, but it’s useless to-_ ”

Harry takes out the ear piece.

“ETA?”

“43 seconds,” Romanov informs him. She stands with the scepter poised over the Tesseract, unspoken support to wait until the last second to close it.

The copper-man doesn’t need to be told what to do. He unspools the grappling line from his kit, snipping the wires with a multitool and tossing the end towards Harry. The tip end must be magnetically charged as he does nothing else but take aim. 

Harry’s deft at knots, but his whole body is shaking. He thinks his heart might be skipping beats, which is annoying and unnecessary.

He continues to tie the knot, going over and over, after the copper-man shoots. 

It must hit the mark, as the length of cord dwindles, but Harry doesn’t watch.

Abruptly, the line snaps taut, nearly taking off Harry’s fingers. The line snags with a tight _twap_ on the chariot’s. 

It groans and _holds_. 

“Thor, can you-” is all the copper-man gets out before Hulk lands with a ground-breaking leap atop the deck. 

The archer falls backward but recovers quickly, nocking an arrow from the quiver at his hip, but he doesn’t draw. Romanov steps to put the Tesseract between them but otherwise just watches.

“Hulk. Good,” Harry says, in too much pain and exhaustion to be relieved. “See this line?”

Hulk scowls at him, like he usually does when he thinks Harry is being intentionally dim. The line whips back and forth where it emerges from the chariot. It will saw itself free on the edge of the plate soon. Stark’s drag through the portal starts to haul it screeching along the roof. 

“It’s like tug-of-war,” Harry says, breathless. He makes a gesture. “Pull.”

Hulk played tug-a-war with a mountain demon once (and damned well nearly got seduced for it), so Harry knows he’s familiar with the game. 

Harry has to lie down. His vision loops and spots.

Hulk takes hold of the line and gives a pull.

When it doesn’t immediately give, a rictus of pure offense menaces his features. With a guttural roar, Hulk grips it with both massive hands and _yanks_ it down. 

Tony Stark pops back into their atmosphere.

Romanov jams the scepter into the core holding the Tesseract. The portal furls back up, reminding Harry vividly of an octopus gathering up the bell of its stretched limbs. It makes a shearing sound, popping Harry’s ears, before cracking like thunder and vanishing entirely.

Stark armor meanwhile banks in the violent wind currents, tumbled like a rag doll.

Harry doesn’t have to convince Hulk to catch him. A blur of red cape collides with Stark’s mass and evens out their fall.

“Fucking BOSS,” the copper-man shouts, arms in the air. He struts off to the rail to add, “See that, _Bitch_!” presumably at any leftover foes over the side of the tower. 

Thor flies Iron Man to the tower deck. It’s already clear it is unresponsive before he lays the armor down. 

Romanov whips out a phone, as Thor hovers around the mask, unsure what to do. 

Maybe… if he hadn’t fucked up the _Scire…_

Harry manages to scrape himself along to kneel beside it. Even without the focus of a spell, his overextended mind touches the tamed electricity under the metal shell.

The chariot was a mass-produced appliance. It was made on a conveyor belt meant to fit any of the recyclable Chitauri.

The armor _loves_ Tony. It has his fingerprints in every part of itself. It knows him the way some people know god. It wants to hold him, keep him — safe, dying, or dead. He made it when he was _bleeding_. It was made with _sacrifice_ and _purpose_. It wants to be Tony Stark’s grave as much as his wings. 

Harry’s mind won’t unfurl. It’s too damaged, too broken. His magic won’t work. There isn’t an _open sesami_ that will do any good because Harry is wounded and weak. 

His thumb glides over the red shine, but it’s powerless. 

Romanov leans down. She has the phone extended. Another woman’s anxious voice speaks, reciting a code of numbers and Greek, and the helmet depressurizes. It is very good that it was sealed.

Romanov lifts the visor and feels inside the padding under Stark’s neck for a pulse. 

“Alive,” she says. “For now.” 

The woman on the phone starts sobbing, high and distressed. Romanov brings it back to her ear and steps away to shield the emotion.

“A med-team should be-” the copper-man says.

“Well done, my-,” Thor says. 

Hulk, apparently deciding they were being too boring, interrupts everything and everyone to roar down in Stark’s face.

The archer leaps out of his skin again, but seeming to have acclimated quickly to Hulk’s general unruliness, doesn’t draw his weapon. 

Thor only grimaces at the volume.

But Stark surges up, gasping wildly. He tries to sit up and swing his fist, but constrained by the armor, he doesn’t get more than a few aborted flails, and panics, body juddering against the metal.

Harry, still lying down, snaps his fingers in front of Stark’s face. Wide, frightened eyes surrounded by their whites turn on him. Harry can see the bolt of his locked jaw, pale. Terror. 

Harry lets those eyes narrow. “You’re in New York,” he tells him. “On your tower. May… something… I think.”

“Who are you?” Stark garbles, more out of it than anticipated.

“Her Majesty the Queen of England.” 

Stark continues to stare and stare. Finally, he says, “I thought she was... white?”

Harry stares back. Chitauri aren’t zooming around overhead. Stark is groggy but alive. Hulk is here. Today might be (hopefully) over (though Harry is never really that lucky and the sun’s only two-thirds through the sky, how the hell?). He lays back and closes his eyes.

“Did we win?” Stark asks. 

“We won,” Romanov tells him. 

Stark absorbs that.

“No one kissed me did they?”

“Hulk tried,” the copper-man lies, “but we managed to stop him. You should be grateful.” The archer shows teeth.

“Full. Full of grates,” Stark manages blearily. 

— — —

Harry is blessedly allowed to rest while Thor flies down to locate Rogers.

“Harry!” Steve shouts, drawing up to him as soon as Thor crests over the deck.

“Nope, I’m fine,” Stark quarrels. He remains prone across from Harry. “Really, just flew up the butt of the universe but I’m dandy.”

“Jesus, Stark!” Steve exclaims, switching trajectory. 

“Tony,” the man corrects with a glower. 

Steve seems to register that without replying. He kneels and hesitates to touch anything. “Is it stuck?”

“Ran out of juice,” Stark explains. “By the way, I’m going to go into cardiac arrest in about seven minutes or so if we don’t replace the arc so...”

“ _Jesus, Tony._ ” 

Captain America begins the laborious process of hauling Stark upright. 

“You blaspheme more than expected,” Stark mumbles. “I like it.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Steve grumbles, not really managing to mask his anxiety as they toddle their way inside. 

Harry scrubs his face. His torn fingernails rub against his beard, reminding him of the number of days he’s been without a clean shave or more than a rushed wash and how many unsavory liquids the day has managed to get on him, some of it _from_ him.

It’s not a condition in which to flee. Around them, Manhattan emits plumes of smoke and broken toothed towers. It’s bizarrely quiet for a city — no sirens yet, no cars or mayhem as people remain hunched where they’d managed to hide, waiting for some sign that it’s ended. 

Harry doesn’t trust SHIELD, and this is America. The territory of their army. Hulk is fast but inconveniently shaped for subterfuge. This is a national disaster. News crews will start hovering in the air space soon. 

The window of opportunity is closing quickly. 

Harry tries to climb to his feet. Motion to his side makes him tense before he registers the familiar green.

Hulk lifts him. Careful, so carefully. His face is a twist of disdain, not looking at Harry at all, but his hand is so gentle. Swallowing Harry’s torso, it tries to set him on his feet. 

Harry leans in, giving over for a moment to the queasiness, the radial lance of pain from his bullet wound, and his head, which feels so bad as to be indescribable. He’ll cobble himself back together in a minute. He’ll get Hulk under the shelter of a roof, and figure out a way to coerce, bully, or negotiate their safety. 

But for now, Hulk can hold him up and Harry can simply be in pain. 

— — —

The sun’s ambient light is still more than enough to illuminate the suite where Loki is propped on his elbows on the floor like something used him as a fly swatter. 

Romanov and Thor both have eyes on him, but Harry catches the quicksilver way Loki’s eyes flit over to him. Harry makes a warding sign and peers through his fingers, checking for glamours and curses. The room looks the same. As does Loki. Quite battered. 

“Your persistent survival is quite astonishing,” Loki says, halfway between amused and droll with a little bit of beaten sprinkled in.

Harry ignores him and heads to the kitchen on the second half-level. While the suite fills with SHIELD agents, he guzzles from the faucet. His face in the fridge’s steel surface looks like it’s been dragged through a lawnmower and kissed by an ifrit. Blisters and bruises and wind burn, Chitauri grime, soot, and shards of glass all matted his beard. His hair needs a weed whacker. 

He washes out the wounds and his mouth with Stark’s prissy Stoli.

Harry affects not to act when the archer sidles up to him. 

With weary aplomb, Loki is being forced into manacles. Thor scrawls some Vanir runes into the surface of the metal.

Romanov oversees the boxing of the scepter. 

The agents filing around the copper-man eye them both with open derision. Harry figures for him it’s probably a remnant of injuring an odd dozen of their colleagues and because he smells like piss and bile, and looks like a half-cooked warthog. But he doesn’t know why the dislike towards the archer. Absently, he wonders about Kohsavi, if she survived the rest of the attack on the helicarrier. Strangely, the vast majority of agents here are men. 

“You good?” the archer asks. 

Harry is inspecting a cut on his cheek. From shrapnel of some sort. If the cabinets don’t have honey, he’ll need to stitch it. Though really what’s the point with the rest of his body the way it is?

“I guess I’ll never be pretty.”

The copper-man grins. 

“I meant...” He places his hand on his own chest, the equivalent spot where Harry was shot.

Harry looks at him, nonplussed.

Loki, passing beneath them, laughs.

“It’s because he’s the one who shot you.”

The copper-man’s expression shutters, cold and blank.

A few of the agents start up a whisper, and glare. 

Harry leans out over the sink to see Loki’s spiteful, smirking face peering up. Harry has to bounce up off his tiptoes to reach and upend the rest of the pilfered Stoli on the bastard’s head. Again.

Thor does a quick two-step out of splash range, his mouth falling open. 

For a moment amidst all of the business, the only sound is that of the liquor gurgling out of the bottle, the splash of it hitting Loki before it slaps on the polished floor. Then, Harry sets the bottle back onto the counter with a _clink_. 

Loki’s infuriated hissing teapot sound is cut off only by the lift. 

“Why,” the archer says, tone full of barely suppressed wrath and distrust. 

Harry needs a razor. He also needs a change of clothes, 40-hours sleep, and about 2000 calories.

“One, humiliation for humiliation seems fair play. Two, revenge for menacing me with that scepter. And three,” Harry shrugs, “I could.”

The copper-man doesn’t grin or laugh. He watches. His eyes, their whites yellowed with bad diets and constant exhaustion, nevertheless are piercingly alert. 

The lift pings. Harry expects Stark and Rogers. Instead, it’s Coulson.

“We have an issue.”

— — —

This day just never ends.


	13. The Never-Ending Day Continues (Part 1)

The floors pass silently, only a hushed hum marking their descent. The archer is adjusting his bow, Stark glibly texting while Steve fidgets and Bruce quietly deteriorates. The artificial silence is an iron maiden. Harry listens to the way Bruce breathes through his nose, completely terrified, and could calmly behead someone. 

— — —

When Coulson tells them what, and precisely who, waits downstairs, he comes with the offer of a plan, watching Harry. And it is an offer, as much as Harry can tell. 

Perhaps sensing the threat of coldblooded murder, Rogers, newly arrived with a tussled Stark, steps between Harry and the exits down the building. He holds his hands up like Harry’s feral, his tone so carefully placating that Harry considers gutting him chin to groin.

Bad. 

Harry has to take a step back from the most prevalent threats, and consider these people — what he knows of them and their loyalties — rationally. 

No quartering people for backing you into a corner, Harry.

“No one is going to-” Rogers says so softly.

Harry’s voice is calm and forceful as steel. “Do not make promises to me, Steve Rogers.” 

Rogers draws back, eyes wounded.

There is too much to think about to force himself to care. 

He can’t, Harry realizes. The damage from the _Scire_ is still bleating against his skull, making it hard to focus. His quickness to turn to violence is one symptom — unreasonable, immediate reactions that are not typical of him. He can’t protect anyone like this. 

Harry turns to Hulk. 

Everyone else scattered about the room, the miscellaneous SHIELD agents vacated with the scepter and Romanov and Thor with either device, Hulk is the most separate, taking a folded seat in front of the busted window. Like this, his resemblance to Bruce is more stark. The shape of their jaw, the way they hold their hands in their lap, the same blocky, hairy digits. Bruce has a sleepy gaze though, one meant to be underestimated, and his spine bows under the weight of his life. Hulk’s gaze is defined by its immediacy to defend himself, and he only bows his spine to interact with the smaller creations of the world. As he does when Harry comes to stand beside him. Even without looking at Harry, his shoulders slope, opening his body language to listen while his gaze stays stubborn on the pocked and splintered city. Or maybe beyond it. 

“What do you think?”

Hulk snorts. The contempt, others might think, could belong to anything, but Harry notes the way Hulk’s gaze rakes him up and down. 

Harry realizes that he’d crossed his arms to guard his belly, unconsciously displaying his fragmentation. And Hulk noticed. He always notices really. He can smell when Harry is hurt even without the gestures. 

Harry sighs, looks over the city.

“You did a good job today.”

Hulk knows how to talk of course, but occasionally the words get jumbled and locked up on their way out. Harry’s not sure if he feels embarrassment or shyness, but his selective mutism tends to come out when they are around people he doesn’t know. 

He forms a fist, knocks his wrist downward for _smash_ , and grins savagely as he gives a thumbs-up. 

But the smile falls quickly, a sign rather than an emotion, and he points to Harry, makes a claw for _wound_ , and frowns thunderously.

Harry puts a fist on his chest and circles, their sign for both _I’m sorry_ and _I love you_. 

Hulk huffs. He looks out at the horizon. _Go?_

Harry puts two fingers on his chest and makes a short slashing motion. _I can’t._

Hulk glowers, which needs no sign, and Harry’s chest feels like it’s spilling. 

Hulk isn’t stupid, nor a child. But he doesn’t like these complicated, human issues. Threats should be straightforward with straightforward solutions. He doesn’t like violence. He’d rather fade into a forest and startle tigers and jump into lakes and duck in and out of waterfalls. But loud sounds — gun bangs, helicopter chops, demolitions — they put him on edge. Sound penetrates far, and he’d rather destroy it than figure out how far he needs to be to escape it. 

They’ve spent four years (including intervals of Bruce) learning which situations call for whose skillset and if Harry can’t flee…

Gradually, Bruce emerges. 

The transformation is grisly, messy. Not as painful, it seems, as lycan shifts, but miserable. Bruce is pink with radiation burns. His hair remains, through some miracle, but organs, bones, every living cell disintegrates before it reforms. Harry doesn’t think Bruce’s brain tracks this as pain more as a sensation of violent illness. His skin quickly repairs, but he’s weak, confused, and vulnerable through the whole process. 

And naked. 

Bruce isn’t modest, but he generally assumes different levels of terribleness depending on how covered he is. Exposure is bad. Fabric is good. Fabric means Harry is there. Fabric means Harry remembers happened, what he did, and Harry will have herded Hulk as best he could from the damning destruction Bruce always fears. 

So Harry is stripping off his coat to cover Bruce when Stark hands him a blanket made of the softest yarn Harry had ever felt. Blinking, Harry takes it and wraps it around Bruce’s slow raw pinkness. 

Bruce very much so does not want to be awake. The blanket means safety, but he’s familiar enough with expediency and terrified terrorized populaces with pointy objects to rouse himself into a somewhat wakeful state. 

Harry gets him sitting, too nauseous and new to be ravenous yet. 

Coulson repeats the issue and the offer of the plan. 

Bruce pales so dramatically Harry thinks he’ll pass out. 

The only reason he’s not catapulted into another transformation is that he’s too physically exhausted. He shakes his head back and forth in denial, huddles shivering in his blanket, and Harry wishes he could let him. 

“You promised,” Bruce says to Coulson, and there are actual tears in his eyes because he can’t regulate or filter yet. “You said I could leave whenever I wanted, as soon as I found the Tesseract. Well, it’s been found!”

Coulson has the grace to wear his regret on his face. It’s really not his fault. He’s probably doing everything he can to give them even these few minutes.

“You could change again,” Harry tells him. Bruce looks at him, eyes rosy with tiredness and blood vessels. “Let SHEILD or whoever divert some attention and go. But I can’t come with you.”

Bruce’s face falls. Bruce wore the same face when he tried to leave Harry in Kolkata.

“You can,” Bruce protests. 

Harry tells him, “I had a seizure.” 

One is not so terrible, but if he doesn’t rest, they will get more aggressive and more frequent, and Bruce won’t be in a position to tend to him.

Bruce rightfully looks horrified. Then, his expression morphs into familiar mulishness, “Well, I’m not leaving you here with _him_.”

“He’s not interested in me.”

“I’ll get him to you,” Stark cuts in. His phone is loose in his palm, other hand holding an ale. Careless as his behavior and tone is, he says, “I’d love for you to stay. Your brain and my brain can make beautiful science babies, but if you need a way out...” Stark glances up. “I get it. I’ll make sure Tarzan here gets back to you. Pinky swear.”

Bruce closes his eyes, naked and gutted and clenching his jaw. 

“No one is going to hurt you. Either of you,” Rogers says. 

Neither Bruce nor Harry can believe them.

So Harry turns to Bruce while he still labors for a decision and says, “If he touches you, I’ll skin him.”

Stark, Rogers, and the archer shoot him startled looks. Coulson just seems quietly reassessing. 

Bruce, stunned, says, “That’s terrible.” 

But Harry hears relief. Broken tension. And bravery. 

“Make a decision,” Harry says. “I need to eat or sleep soon.”

\- — — — -

Harry puts his hands in his pockets and waits for the doors to open. 

“General!” Stark crows, stepping from the lift. “You’ve come to help with the emergency relief of course. Why else would you be here?” he asks with a wolfish grin.

Romanov and Thor will be returning after they finish negotiating the delivery of the scepter and Loki. Coulson, Stark, Rogers, the copper-archer who got named Hawkeye, and Harry stand between Thaddeus Ross, his army, and Bruce. 

SHEILD has set up somewhat of a base of operations here, the only building that remains structurally intact at the epicenter of the invasion. Ross’ platoon sergeant, a white man with sunglasses and an assault rifle, has been standing at Ross’ shoulder while Coulson winds them in red tape and the blandest bureaucracy possible to give Harry and Bruce time to change and clean up. 

As soon as they step off the lift, Ross goes stiff, eyes training on Bruce like a scent hound. Bruce counts his breaths and doesn’t look at him. Harry sees a cold sweat break out over his colorless lip. 

Only Stark isn’t tense at attention. 

He nearly tap dances into the center of it all. 

“What’s with the guns? Fight’s over. You missed it,” he says, baring his teeth again. “Early bird gets the worm and all that. Did you stop for lunch on the way or something? I have to admit, I’m starving. All that saving the day. Really works up an appetite you know.”

Ross’ face goes tight with irritation. “Stark, we’re here to-”

“Help with the first responders,” Stark cuts in. “I mean, you can’t be storming my tower with 33- Hey! I see you over there! Don’t think that ficus hides you. Why do we have a ficus? Ficuses are boring. Ficuses? Fici?”

“You could get a lemon tree,” Hawkeye says. 

“I like lemons,” Steve adds. Arms crossed, he’s been staring balefully at Ross since they came out of the lift.

“Is it ficuses or fici?” Stark asks.

“The plural is the same as the singular,” Bruce says quietly.

This seems to give Ross the momentum to try to speak again. He only gets as far as “He-” before Stark cuts over him again.

“Thank you! That would have bothered me. Anyway, I can’t _believe_ that you are breaking into my tower with 33 army men - and women, wait, no, I don’t see a woman; that’s sexist — without so much as an invitation or a warrant. That would be the height of recklessness, wouldn’t it, Agent?”

“I think so, yes,” Coulson obliges.

“Reckless stupidity. An affront of the American justice system. You wouldn’t be reckless and stupid, would you, General?”

“Watch it, Stark. Not so many men in your pocket since you stopped funding our troops.”

“I’ve stopped making weapons. I haven’t stopped providing for the women and men fighting on foreign soil,” Stark says, suddenly serious. Then, a cutting grin curls over his face. “But you wouldn’t know about that. You haven’t been out in the field in a while. You tend to butcher the people under your command, don’t you? I’m frankly surprised you still have a rank.”

Harry watches Ross bristle. His face reddens as veins pop in his neck. 

“I serve my country. With honor and integrity. What would you know about either of those? Your own company sold arms to terrorists tearing our men apart,” he adds just as Stark opens his mouth. 

It’s there. The carefully but not too quickly hid flinch where Ross’ words bleed him. The pause Ross fills with his smug grin. 

Steve rolls forward like he means to body-throw Ross through a wall. “Tony Stark is one of the most heroic men I have ever met. He put his life on the line to save the very city you’re standing in. What are you doing here? There are people outside. They need help. You’re standing here insulting one of the few people brave enough and smart enough to defeat an alien army when you could be helping them.”

The censure in Steve’s voice is an amazing thing. Harry watches the wave of it hit every soldier in a shuffle of feet. Like magic. 

Ross, feeling the tide turning against him, finds Bruce again. 

Ross brought this on himself with the lie he wove so long ago. 

The night of the Incident, Bruce Banner was declared a causality of the bad lab safety that allowed Hulk to be born. According to a coroner’s report, Bruce’s negligence killed himself alongside a list of names no one hardly thinks to remember. And according to Ross, Hulk had never been human and never would be, a mutant animal considered military property.

Harry doesn’t pretend this isn’t frightening. They are one blurted accusation from a messy gun fight, a political clusterfuck, and for Bruce, unending medical torture or another trail of fire and destruction (at least the city’s already burning). Their only advantage is that Ross does not want to get caught in a lie. He’s not the big name he was before he let Hulk escape, before he allowed him to bulldoze through Harlem. He stretched his considerable weight not getting discharged.

Now, the wager, that Ross wouldn’t have the clout to admit his mistake, seems to pay off. 

Though he glares, his lips remain pressed shut. 

“Welp,” Stark says with all the grace of a peg-legged pelican. “If you will excuse us then, we can all get on our merry way without Captain America tossing you out on his pretty frisbee.”

“The Hulk belongs in a cage,” the general snarls. “It’s a dangerous menace. You can’t control it.”

“As I have said before, General,” Coulson steps nimbly in. “SHEILD is dealing with the issue of Hulk’s appearance today. Though it should be noted, he saved many lives-”

The general snorts. “ _It_ doesn’t think, Agent Coulson. It goes for the largest target. The largest target today were those aliens. But the next time, who knows what it will go for after? I’ve told you before.” His gaze spears Bruce. “It goes into hibernation after it has expended so much energy. But it always comes out, and it always kills. No one but I can control it. How many dead do you need before you put the thing where it belongs?”

Bruce keeps breathing. It’s all he can manage to do. The absolute worst thing is that nothing Ross is saying is anything Bruce hasn’t already told himself. 

Hulk was drawn to a cow’s birthing screams once. They’d scared the bejeezus out of the farmer on hand, but Hulk had shushed the poor, struggling animal. Harry remembers the weight of his fingers so tender on her white side. The smell of excrement and blood was rich everywhere around them. With Harry’s mediation, the three of them had managed to get the calf turned back around. It came wet and knobby, ugly and beautiful and took its mother teat while Hulk was still petting her side, knocking aside flies. 

Hulk heard something bellowing in pain in the night and went to help. He growled at a tiger to save a stupid baby langur. No prey-animal Harry’s ever met has been scared of Hulk the way they are scared of humans. 

Men like Ross don’t care. Harry doesn’t know how to make them care. Harry had his capacity for genuine emotions ripped out of him and he still knows how to distinguish monsters from lonely animals. 

Harry bumps Bruce’s shoulder. 

Bruce jumps inside his own skin, and glances at him. Harry only has his cold stare to offer. And his hand where he’s not sure it’s welcome against the back of Bruce’s wrist.

Bruce blinks and grips him back desperately.

It’s a relief. 

Ross’ attention transfers to Harry. 

Harry know what Ross will see.

A rangy brown bum Bruce must have collected off the streets of India, like he would (and has) a stray dog.

Harry knows who had the money and resources to purchase the bounty hunters who bombed the clinic, (who hunted the Ghats where Harry and Hulk first met). Only a certain amount of cash and insider knowledge of which officials to bribe could afford that level of commitment and crassness. 

Harry doesn’t Look at people’s dead unless he has reason.

There are rules. 

Beyond Ross’ monstrous indifference, there are people with lab coats and uniforms. Some of the red string connecting them to Ross are on his trigger finger but most of them are tied around his neck. A lot more than expected. A lot more civilians than expected.

Even now, Harry knows Ross sees Harry as a tool he can use to bind Hulk. Ross is so ordinary, so privileged in his ordinariness that he’s never questioned his own sense of superiority. He inherited power from his military family, learned how to abuse it in the same process as using it, and thinks it’s _unfair_ when he doesn’t get his way. Bruce’s ongoing freedom upsets the natural hierarchy of the world. Every terrible indignity that Ross has had to suffer, he thinks stems from Bruce’s _unnatural_ resistance to being a lab rat.

Harry’s brain pulses with pain, and the urge to commit violence grows. The only thing preventing him may be Bruce’s hand, holding him still. 

In the bald oppressive silence (more than one goon glancing between the two of them), the lift chimes. Thor and Agent Romanov spill into the foyer. 

“Friends!” Thor announces. His head sweeps back and forth. “Were we not on the way to procure nourishment?”

“Took the words out of my mouth, Goldilocks,” Stark says. 

They walk out. 

The soldiers shift restlessly, aware of something happening if not entirely certain what, but no one stops them. 

As they pass Ross, Hawkeye sticks out his tongue. Ross does a double take. 

Outside, the sun is too bright. The smell of burning (diesel, plasma, rubber, _meat_ ) is everywhere. He closes his eyes. He’s never the best at differentiating the dead and the living as it is and with his head like this…

If he starts talking and staring at people no one else can see, it’s going to be a problem. 

Only a minute in the open, Harry trips on the crag of pavement and would have skinned himself if Bruce hadn’t pulled him up by the hand. 

“Harry?”

Harry shakes his head.

It is drudging so Harry recites passages, the way he did as a boy trapped in a cupboard, memorizing the books Dudley threw in the bin and that Harry nicked from desks at school. 

Stark swears that the owner of a tidy shop with its front missing can be persuaded to get them food. He’s never had shawarma. 

Harry feels even more ill, stringy in the sunlight. Full of thoughts he aren’t sure are his.

They reach the restaurant and Stark flirts with the frazzled owner. The older woman wants to know if the world is ending. The who, what, why, how of it all, which Stark can’t say. Increasingly irate, she lapses into Farsi. 

Stark Farsis back, accented but understandable. He’s soft with her, that hungry hyena grin subsiding to a charming one. He reassures her that they’ve got it all handled. They just need to eat. The invaders are gone. They aren’t coming back. You’re safe. It’s safe now. They just need to wind down and eat. 

She rewinds her scarf around her neck, a little less nervy, and shuffles them into seats. 

Her hands and voice still faintly shake. 

“I promise I’ll tip handsomely,” Stark says tiredly as he sinks into the seat. 

“No. No,” she protests. 

She pats Stark’s shoulder with a well-withered hand. It is grandmotherly and causes Stark’s eyes to go wide through the initial recoil. Then she’s drifted to the back. A figure Harry decides is her grandson comes out to sweep the rubble. 

Overwhelmed, all of them subside into silence.

Harry has drifted into a reparative doze when Bruce speaks, low.

“Harry? You smell… I smell bleeding.”

Harry doesn’t fathom which part of him he can possibly be talking about before he remembers the helicarrier and the gunshot would that was more or less repaired. 

He grunts.

Bruce frets. “May I…” He reaches for Harry’s coat.

Harry looks around the table without really taking anything in, too tired care when no one protests about bringing medical care to the table. 

He leans up, shrugging off his SI jacket. The lethifold shirt has to be unfastened at the side and unwrapped before it exposes his shoulder. 

Bruce’s throat clicks as he gets a look. The healed flesh has ripped. The skin appears shredded like old silk, pulled apart from the center in a red Bethlehem star.

“Wow,” he says dryly. First a lightning bolt. Now a star. 

“Did Loki heal it?”

“I was unconscious,” he admits.

“You don’t think he… Well, left anything?”

Harry blinks at him wearily before glancing at Thor.

Sensing it, Thor raises his eyes. With a grunt of effort, he rises and goes around the table. Harry turns himself for the Aesir’s observation. 

“I feel none of my brother’s spellcraft.”

“Spellcraft,” Stark grumbles. “Fuckity-fuck.”

Bruce turns to the owner. “Do you have a med kit?”

Thor sits back down. 

As she shows it to him, Harry considers the wound. If Bruce fusses over it, it won’t scar badly, and it’s in good company. He has a rope of scar tissue trailing over his right shoulder from a severing hex. Actual rope burns faint under his chin from a strangulation curse. Claw marks around his hips that barely reach up over the hem of his trousers where they can see. And a couple of flogging marks from an over-enthusiastic (and clumsy) lover. Except for the severing hex and the claw dents, they are fairly faint. Things that would have scarred terribly were magically healed.

“Did the bullet exit?”

“Loki said he took it out.”

Bruce does not like that.

“I should clarify,” Thor coughs. “I can only sense magical foreign bodies. Bullets elude my senses.”

“Stop saying magic,” Stark says. 

Bruce says, “I’d like to get you an X-ray.”

“Let’s order one to-go.”

“Harry.”

“Bruce.”

Bruce tries to attempt a staring contest. Harry doesn’t engage.

“May I…” He bites his tongue. “I’d like to look at your back. See if I notice any odd pooling of blood or heat or swelling.”

Harry huffs, more tired than annoyed. Bruce grimaces.

After a moment of silent communication, Harry turns around in the seat. 

Most everyone at the table is too well-trained in some way or the other to gasp or make exclamations, but there is a beat of stillness after Harry exposes his back. 

The rope of the severing hex extends down over his shoulder, nearly touching his spine (hallowing in and of itself as it looks like Harry at on point got split in two) but it is not the cause of the drama. 

The silvery contusion almost looks like electrical scarring. It has the delicate detail of a tattoo but the definition of a well-healed scar, traveling down from the base of his skull. Fed on Loki’s magic, it probably has unfurled into a snowy lace, branching down his spine. It is unrealistically white. He supposes, if it were possible, it looks like someone very lovingly bleached his skin.

Some think the design is a quartered snowflake or fancy roots. Harry doesn’t correct them, but its true design is that of mycelium. 

It unnerves most folk. Even magical ones. The application process isn’t human, and it is living. Though it resembles fungus, it actually is ink, mixed with a milky-white sap and that absorbs ambient magic. It doesn’t give it _to_ Harry, but it stores it to passively repair cell damage, help take care of toxins, and provide energy when his calorie intake is low. An automatic process he doesn't control. 

Useful for a homeless magician that can’t even perform a warming charm. 

It’s an odd bit of his body that has proved its usefulness more time than he can count. The uncanniness of it is rather beside the point.

Bruce avoids touching it. It may also be a bit flushed from the rakshasa two days ago ( _only two days?_ ). That it must change every time Bruce sees it is something he’s never brought up. 

Bruce palpitates the region for soreness or heat. Eventually, bracing Harry with his other palm, he pushes hard but Harry doesn’t feel any discomfort other than the stretched and serrated wound itself. 

“Feels fine,” Bruce says, not at all satisfied.

Harry turns back around. Bruce flushes the wound with hydrogen peroxide (ow) and applies an antiseptic before dressing it with gauze. 

Harry allows him, nearly too sleepy to function.

In the middle of his care, the lady sets down baskets. Nonplussed by the injury, they all start to eat. 

Bruce wraps him the grey lethifold skin and fastens it closed. He then nudges Harry awake enough to eat. 

“So,” Hawkeye starts after some headway is made into carbs. “You an alien?”

Bruce deflects, “I don’t think now is the best time-”

“Well, you two are fucking off into the sunset sometime soon and I wanna know,” he says. 

Harry sleepily realizes that he smells coffee. Turkish coffee with whiffs of cardamon. Thor looks absolutely delighted.

Harry realizes everyone is looking at him.

“Sorry?”

“You,” Hawkeyes says. He points. “Alien.” He makes a hand motion. 

“You are not Midgardian?” Thor asks.

He’s too brutally tired to do more than point to himself and say, “Earth.”

“Then how?” Stark asks. He wipes up the yoghurt with his lamb.“You’re not anatomically capable of piloting those vehicles.” 

“Have you checked?” Harry asks.

Bruce elbows him. He then turns towards the table.

“What vehicles?”

Stark immediately looks like a grade schooler being forced to snitch. 

Romanov has no such qualms. She folds pita around an abundance of sauce and says, “He piloted one of those Chitauri hovering crafts. They have needles that bore into their ports.”

Bruce looks at Harry. If Harry hadn’t stripped earlier, he would have been made to now. 

Harry, unable to think of anything to say, focuses on his food.

“What,” Bruce asks. 

“That may be have been a short-sighted decision,” Harry relents. 

Bruce leans back in his seat. “I may actually kill you,” he realizes. Little too late, honestly. “What _the fuck_ were you thinking?” 

Bruce doesn’t curse often. In English. 

“Truly?” he asks. It’s rhetorical. Bruce does not answer and Harry swallows his food. “‘Hey, I wonder if I can do that.’”

Hawkeyes gives a little laugh. 

“What are you?” Stark asks, leaning forward. “Like some xeno-animorph?”

“I don’t know what that is.”

The owner comes back with the tray of coffee. Bruce’s hand comes down on the mug Harry tries to take.

“You are not drinking a diuretic, and you do not need a stimulant.”

“I think that depends on how involved you want me in this conversation.”

“Hey,” Hawkeye says, “I just want to say the fact you can fly alien aircraft is hella suspicious.”

Bruce bristles. “What are you saying?”

“That I want to hear his side of it,” Hawkeye says, meeting his glare even.

“What happens if I am alien?” Harry wonders. 

“If you’ve been integrated in human society since you were a child, then there is an international security risk,” Romanov says. 

“You smell Midgardian,” Thor inputs. 

“Why haven’t you just answered the question?” 

Astonishingly, it’s Stark who navigates them back on point. He’s been watching Harry, drinking coffee. 

He sips, eyes intent. “It would benefit you to do so. You trusted us to have Bruce’s back with Ross. Why not this?”

“You like Bruce.”

“Pardon?”

“SHIELD doesn’t want Hulk in the hands of the army. Rogers is an honorable man who doesn’t condone those type of science experiments-”

“Ironically,” Stark chirps.

“-Thor wasn’t present, but if he had been, I would have wagered, if he can any interest at all, his etiquette for allies made on the field of battle would have extended to Bruce. You want him to work with you, so protecting him seems part of that. I, however, am something that does not fit. You’re the good type of man who would dive out of a window or into a void to save someone else, but I don’t fit. It hasn’t occurred to you that it’s none of your business. You’ve never met a consequence you couldn’t out-think. I don’t have that luxury, Mr. Stark. I certainly don’t have the privilege of SHIELD’s discretion. Captain Rogers, while good-hearted, is a stranger who trusts SHIELD, and Thor is preoccupied with his brother. That you expect me to trust you is frankly…” 

He struggles for a word.

“Illogical?” Bruce offers. 

“Yes. Illogical. Why are you concerned about trusting me in the first place? Beyond the battle today, there’s no reason.”

“I think the international risk part comes in there,” Bruce says. 

“But go off I guess,” Hawkeye mutters. 

Harry rummages for the linen Bruce used to wipe up his wound from the floor. He tosses it at Stark.

“Go nuts. There should be a blood stain on the helicarrier that SHIELD can test if they haven’t swiped my litter already.”

“Petty _and_ vicious,” Hawkeye smirks. “You know.” He leans back. “Despite still _completely_ avoiding answering my question, I think I like you. I still vote alien.”

“Government experiment,” Romanov says, unmoved entirely by any of the discussion.

Stark considers the linen. “I think everyone at the table is an alien or a government experiment except for me.”

“Hey, I’m a carnie,” Hawkeye corrects. 

“Is a carnie a type of human?” Thor asks in a mutter. 

Romanov opens her mouth to answer, reconsiders, and shrugs. 

“Close enough,” she says. 

“I don’t care about your illicit backstory, but I am going to figure out _how_ you got that Chitauri cruiser to run,” Stark says, promises. 

Harry waves to complete his previous statement to ‘go nuts,’ and tries to take a nap. 

— — —

When he wakes again, Coulson is leaning over him. They are still in the restaurant and he has a phone.

Harry doesn’t even begin to hope he brings good news. He never brings good news. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm exhausted. I edited this so much. I have a problem.


	14. Why do I have to deal with management when I'm not even employed? (Part 1)

The crunch of glass announces Phil Coulson as he steps into the tiny restaurant. He walks to Harry’s chair, holding out a phone. 

His face is about as blunt as a butter knife. All the better to bludgeon you with, Harry thinks, blinking himself awake. 

“It’s for you,” he says when Harry wakes. 

“If it’s Director Fury...” Bruce starts.

“Oh, it’s not,” Coulson says, waiting. The look of patience on his face feels like a garrote. 

Harry takes the phone.

“Hello?” he asks in the receiver. 

“ _I do not appreciate being called out of my busy schedule to deal with your reckless endangerment, Mr. Potter._ ” 

There is a moment when nothing happens in his brain. A blank desert as his mouth corrects, “Hartson.”

He considers hanging up, but that is likely an even worse idea than his usual ones. After only a second of hesitation, Harry finds the speaker phone icon.

Castor Sturnway, head of the magical-muggle liaison in the MoM, pauses for a long, appalled two and a half seconds. “ _Did you just put me on speaker phone?_ ”

“You called a SHIELD agent,” Harry says. He sets the phone on the table so he can go back to slumping. “I mean, if you wanted a private conversation…” That was not the way to go. 

But Harry knows an intimidation tactic when he sees one.

“Hello,” Stark says jovially. “Who are you?” 

Sturnway laughs. “ _There are so many easier ways to slit your own throat. Hartson._ ”

“Rude,” Stark huffs. 

“What is your relationship to Mr. Hartson?” Steve asks. He glances at Harry. “He needs rest.”

“ _Parole officer? Case worker?_ ” Sturnway says lazily, giving the impression that he’s doing paperwork while talking. “ _Off the clock public servant who is not paid to deal with his staggering ineptitude_.”

Ah. The call isn’t sanctioned, which means Harry is still in the very precarious position of being expected to prove he’s not trying to break the Statute of Secrecy to muggles or compromising the magical world to Loki. 

“Nothing happened.”

“ _Clearly_ ,” Sturnway clips. “ _While you were shanghaied by Carter’s shady spy network, interrogated by Director Fury, kidnapped by an exiled prince of Asgard, who, let me see if I understand this correctly, had a_ functional mind control device _, nothing happened. Anyone with even an iota of intelligence would have you buried. Explain why I shouldn’t have you buried._ ”

“Paperwork?” Harry says after a moment of consideration. 

Harry hears papers shuffle. “ _You. Are a lot more work alive. Than dead. This would be so much easier if you were dead._ ”

Harry grunts in agreement. 

“Nothing’s changed,” Harry corrects his earlier statement. 

“ _Prison. Possibly leave you there until your teeth fall out._ ”

“Norway?”

“ _Wales_ ,” Sturnway hisses. 

That’s the one they sent the Death Eaters to since Azkaban was a pile of rubble. The Dementors were banished after the war, but it’s still not a very pleasant place, despite how lovely Wales is. Being imprisoned with Death Eaters would be… interesting. 

“My statement still holds.”

“ _Does it?_ ” Sturnway says. Arsenic. “ _What did you promise, when we removed ourselves and let you leave?_ ”

Removed ourselves. Let him leave. 

Interesting wording. 

“I promised,” Harry says, “to say out of politics. I did so. I fought pillagers killing civilians,” Harry says. “That’s all. That’s all ever do.” 

“ _Playing the hero_ ,” Sturnway says, “ _is always political.”_

“Then bury me.” Keeping up with this conversation is a herculean effort. “Maybe it will help me sleep.”

Sturnway’s sigh is so loud it statics the phone. Harry knows he has an old rotary. He can’t imagine the MoM updating to cells. Sturnway’s office didn’t even have a phone at all before his posting. Sturnway inherited all the mess that caused Harry to leave the aurors, and England, in the first place. 

“ _The mind-control device_ ,” Sturnway says, the real reason he called.

“I didn’t- It didn’t get used on me.”

“ _Would you have-_ ”

“Yes,” Harry says.

“ _Well_ ,” Sturnway says awkwardly. “ _Your country would thank you-_ ”

“Oh that can get fucked.”

“- _if you hadn’t have gotten yourself into the situation in the first place_ ,” Sturnway finishes, cross. “ _We are monitoring your_ precarious _situation._ Try _not to cause me to make a call I would prefer not to, if you can manage._ ”

“Attempts will be made.”

“ _Agent Coulson,”_ he hears Sturnway say. “ _Please inform Director Fury that if Mr. Hartson is interrogated again, I have evidence that certain members of your Council ordered the nuclear strike on Manhattan. I’m sure certain parties would be very interested in those documents. They are very secure. Very impulsive and reckless decision that._ ” 

“I’m sure the Director will have many responses for that,” Coulson says blandly. 

Sturnway hangs up.

“Migardian politics are very… interesting,” Thor says.

Sturnway always has the potential to be an ally and an enemy. He knows Harry’s weak points but he is smart enough not to use them. The threat hangs better silent. It isn’t his job, but he does the work of overseeing Harry and the complicated situation between him and the Ministry. 

Harry surfaced from Tír na nÓg after only a brief summer season, reappearing only a few days after his birthday actually, and seven prominent government officials disappeared shortly after. Harry submitted to arrest but was never brought up on charges. He hardly remembers what happened. There is a darkness and a scent of fear so massive he sometimes remembers it like a beast. But nothing firm rises from that mire until his stay with Cyril. Everything between the mounds and Bordeaux is a mess he’s locked away.

He knows he scared the ever-loving fuck out of everyone including the people trying to help him. He also knows that most the upper caste of Ministry members know he has the Elder Wand, and they also know he’ll lobotomize his memories before giving any of them the location. They know, he suspects, because they tried to rip it out of him during his arrest. Harry might have hurt some people. He’s not sure. He honestly doesn’t care. 

Sturnway is from rich muggle blood, graduated from a less prestigious magical school in London as a wizard and something like Oxford as a businessman cum politician. He’s perfectly-bred, upper-crust muggle and an underdog mage, that grants him both charm and sympathy, and he seemingly, honestly just wants Harry to somehow ethically disappear. He cares about people, but Queen and Country come before everything else. 

Harry doesn’t really mind him. 

“They _really_ don’t want you to talk to anyone,” Stark says, completely intrigued. 

“What was that?” Hawkeye asks. “About the scepter? Would you have what?”

Had any of the others asked he wouldn’t have answered. But he knows better what Hawkeye means.

Harry turns his head up on the table to face him but doesn’t open his eyes. “Destroy my memory.”

“Uh,” Stark says. “Brains can’t do that.”

Harry hums.

Bruce touches Harry’s chair. “You would have destroyed it? How much of it?”

Harry’s lack of answer is answer enough. 

Since he’s known him, Harry’s ruthless disregard for the basic tenets of life has troubled or outright appalled Bruce. Since the mounds, Harry’s senses, no. His interest in them — that would be more accurate — has been diluting. Rather than them not existing, he just doesn’t care. He can contort his legilimency to a kind of empathy, to experience emotions like anger or sadness or joy or pleasure, but the impulses behind them — fear, want, and the ambitions they create and feed — are gone. 

Logically, he knows he should be concerned about the type of self-violence he’s suggesting, but it’s inconvenient. He made a promise to protect people. Worrying about the means of doing so, when it fits the Greater Good, is buying upset he doesn’t need to keep his word. 

Having Bruce to worry for him has been like pressure off a bruise. Love, he has decided, doesn’t have to be an emotion, if he treats it logically. The decision to cherish something that doesn’t last. 

“God, Harry, dammit,” Bruce breathes by his side.

  
He slides his fingers into Harry’s filthy, oily hair. He tugs at at the strain along his scalp. It’s the desperately needed permission Harry needs to finally _rest_. To tend to his mind and stop _dealing_ with other people and their suspicions and egotism. 

He sinks down.

\- — — — -

“To have such control over one’s mind,” Thor says as Hartson falls into unconsciousness like a flipped toggle, “he must surely have a will great as the mightiest warrior.”

“Sorry, Goldilocks, but I smell bullshit,” Tony says.

Thor frowns and sniffs. 

“I mean,” Tony says. “It doesn’t make any sense.”

“That you know of,” Steve says.

Tony scowls. 

“This is all… just… great,” Clint says. “Having witnessed aliens fly through a wormhole in the sky today, I’ll believe the guy’s got a weird head. My question is, how fucking weird? No seriously. I’m going to go ape-shit if he reads minds. He doesn’t read minds, right?” he asks Bruce. 

“That’s a question you can ask him.”

“That answer is _fucking_ disconcerting.”

“I think asking that might count as an interrogation,” Steve points out.

“Maybe the Council deserves to have some accountability,” Coulson of all people says.

“That’s very close to treason, sir,” Clint notes. 

“Don’t do the crime if you can’t own up to it on national television,” Tony says.

Observantly, Steve remarks, “That would cause national panic.”

“I doubt a one of them will take responsibility no matter what some cloaked flunky on a phone reveals to the press,” Natasha says reasonably.

“Banner,” Clint says. “Bruce. Bud. I would not ask if I did not absolutely _no-fucking-shit_ need to know. How mystical hand-wavey is his brain?”

Bruce sighs. “I don’t know,” he admits. “He’s prescient. But actual telepathy?” Bruce shakes his head. 

“Have you not even discussed it?” Natasha asks.

Bruce frowns. “He’s… made comments. When concussed and… ingesting stuff he shouldn’t.” He glances down at his friend, both reproving and unaccountably fond. “He’s a good person. The way he sees it, peeking into minds is indecent, but he has likened it also to feeling like he’s wading in other people’s fecal matter. Not sure if that was literal.”

His expression turns grim.

“He knows the domestic abusers. Always. He holds himself looser around children. He finds them. When they’re lost.”

“So you think he’s a weird, psychic human. Not an alien.” 

“He smells human.”

“Okay, what?”

“I _am_ the Hulk you know. The serum gave me boosters in addition to the green rage monster thing and the black-outs,” he adds sardonically. 

“Did the serum give _you_ doggy powers?” Tony asks Steve.

Steve blushes. “It did, um, take a while. To find out other people weren’t… as perceptive. It took forever to realize people only see six colors,” he grumbles. 

Tony laughs. “What? No, really. What? Are you a mantis shrimp? This is amazing. I need to scan your eyes.”

Steve leans away from him. 

“Submit an IRB first, Stark,” Coulson says.

“Fucking IRB.”

“Ok. Ok,” Clint mutters, hands up. “I have… one more. One more question. Is that like… why… with Hulk?”

Bruce frowns. “I don’t know what you mean.”

“I mean, he’s pretty chill. With Hulk. And Hulk like… likes him? Do you think he’s, you know.”

“Manipulating Hulk’s emotions,” Natasha finishes for him.

“Yeah, exactly!”

“I…” He looks down at Harry. “I never remember when I’m Hulk. Harry… Hulk doesn’t panic. Doesn’t cause as much damage. Or,” he swallows, “hurt me, as much. You know. When Harry’s around. I noticed. Of course. I did experiments. I don’t think Harry would manipulate Hulk, or anyone.”

“Not intentionally maybe,” Natasha says. 

“No,” Bruce says, more firmly. “Harry wouldn’t without permission.”

“But you said you don’t remember,” Clint trails.

“But I know Harry. He’s… honorable. It sounds stupid I know, but Harry. He has… He has a ridiculous thing about consent,” he blurts. “No. Not ridiculous. But. Solid. Unbending. About that thing. If he suspected, even a little, that he was doing harm, he would have said… Or he would have left.”

Steve remarks, soft, “You have a great deal of faith in him.”

“Not many people can deal with _me_ ,” Bruce says. “Much less Hulk..”

“He’s a killer,” Natasha says. 

“Lots of people kill for lots of reasons,” Steve says, unexpectedly solemn. “I’ve seen men… _I’ve_ killed, to protect the soldier beside me. It was the only right we could do.”

“Wow, this has gotten heavy,” says Tony. He’s on his phone. “I’m going to have to bail on this party. I’ve got a shit-ton of work now.”

“Tony,” Steve calls, saying his name clearly. “Please rest. You… you gave all of us a shock.”

Tony laughs self-consciously. His hand comes up to fiddle with sunglasses that aren’t there and falls aside awkwardly. 

“Nope, sleep is for losers.”

Bruce coughs meaningfully with handfuls of Harry.

Tony smirks. 

“I’m going to set you up at my dad’s mansion. It is _not_ lacking windows or crawling with SHEILD agents, though it’s probably musty, or smells like stale cigars and whiskey. Haven’t checked.”

Bruce blinks. “Thank you.”

Tony waves him off. “Invitation’s open. SHIELD dorms probably suck.”

“They do,” Coulson confirms. “They are also under 50 tons of space-whale.”

Tony winces. “I’m not hosting more than the murder twins. And maybe you. If you ask nicely.”

“I’ll ask Miss Potts.”

“It’s _my_ mansion!” Tony whines without sounding particularly put out. 

Coulson wrangles Steve and Thor, the least burnt out of the lot, for search-and-rescue, and the rest of them disperse. Harry doesn't bother to wake for it. 


	15. Boy finally gets a shower and some sleep (Part 1)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I absolutely love how many of you all were so happy Harry is finally getting some sleep. Completely unexpected but *chef's kiss* reaction.

The ground smells green. Under the hush of the forest’s dense carpet, Harry steps over roots and matted leaves, following a straggly deer path towards the lake. 

“-baaaby,” a voice sings. “Go to sleep ya lil baaaby. Everybody’s gone and the cotton and the corn d’n’t leave noobody but the baaaby.”

Harry follows the notes. 

A woman sitting on the cuffed shore sings in time with the lap of water, the ‘bee’ of the baby accompanied the tongue of the lake licking the stone.

“You’re a sweet lil baaaby. You’re a sweet lil baaaby. Honey on the rock and the sugar don’t stop. Gotta bring a bottle to the baaaby.”

Death is desert-bonze, her hair in beads and rope. But even as he approaches, her form dream-slides to a paler Grecian hue (tripled-headed), like milk added to darjeeling, before settling back, like the ghost of a polaroid. Her raptor feet flex, dipping into the water. The sleek pale grey feathers behind her fall in a peacock’s train.

“Don’cha weep pretty baaabyy. Don’cha weep ya pretty baaaby. She’s long gone with her reed shoes on. Gonna need another lovin’ baaaby. Go to sleep ya lil baaaby. Go to sleep ya lil baaaby. You and meee and the devil makes three. Don’t need no other lovin’ baaaby.

“Go to sleep ya lil baaaby. Go to sleep ya lil baaaby. Come’n lay your boones on the alabaster stoones and be my everlovin’ baaaby.”

Harry parts from the loamy form of the woods, shifting out of a pseudo-bow as his body goes from hart to human. He approaches, his soles and toes black with earth. He smells the wood, but he also smells the water. And her. Like delightful mushroom and wet bloodmeal. 

She glances his way as he sits but continues to hum and preen the small feathers on her legs. 

“Did I die again?” he asks.

“Nah. Not this time.” Her gaze turns him over. Her pupil-less eyes are the murky color of the soupy morning mists, drifting over the water. “Why this one?” she asks, the rasp of weeds. 

Harry peers over the slow waters, so much like the waves of an obsidian knife. When he was a student, he went to the owl towers to think, to be alone. The lake, he considers, is where he met with Ron and Hermione and Hagrid, where they plotted their erstwhile battles against awful teachers, Draco Malfoy, and complacent Ministry officials.

In the world outside the dreaming, there was an isle the professors raised to house Dumbledore’s tomb, but it is not here. 

“I like it here,” Harry says. 

“Most of the living don’t imagine my lands as very likable.”

“We could have it turn into a train station again.”

“Ah hell, no,” she squawks. 

Harry smiles at her fondly. 

“Why this one?” he asks her, speaking of her taloned, feathered choice of evening wear. 

She smirks back at him, all tooth and malice. “I like this one. Or would you prefer I go back to being Dumbledore?”

“Ah hell, no,” Harry repeats, prim.

She parks a clawed foot up on the bank and lays her arm across the knee. “Indeed, oh, Master of Death.”

She says it the way a mother might, and he floods with embarrassment.

“Stop it.” 

She just gives him a look of uncensored love, too knowing and indulgent, before turning back to the lake. 

She starts up a song again, this one in a language almost but unlike Farsi. It’s just as haunting and lovely and probably as poignant. 

He closes his eyes and Death’s impossibilities divide him and conquer.

Ereshkigal. Mictēcacihuātl. Meng Po. Kali. Freyja. Libitina. Hine-nui-te-pō. Izanami. Giltinė. The multitudes of faces, malevolent and benevolent, burning with pyres, cold with cairns. The crackle of straw effigies. The rattling of headdresses like bones, both cattle and human. Snakes and owls and lions. She smells well-fed, like the type of earth that never stops becoming. 

He leans against her side and he’s made for this, her beast, her burden, her avatar and he feels the **distant pain of disgorgement** , of **claws ripping his abdomen** he **panics** and **pants** and **pains**. It’s ecstasy the way **saints speak of ecstasy** , love the way **infants feel it** , blind and selfish and innocent with need.

Harry comes to himself with his head in her lap, her belly soft as peat. The dreamful quality of dying doesn’t hurt precisely the way it would in the waking world, the memory of pain. 

She no longer looks like the Queen of Kur. This aspect has a skull mask pushed to the side of her face, the long dark and wavy hair of Santa Muerte falling around the halo of her face. The bones beneath her face have shifted, but she has the same lighthouse eyes fitted under those long lovely lashes. This Death looks less like she’d tie you to stone and eat, and more like she’d carry you to eternal sleep with a cup of thick milky chocolate to ease the way. 

“Heading back?” she asks as her thumb gently skirts the rise of his cheek. 

He loves the way she smells, like the world. Like brine rather than sweat. Like cedar and predator musk and dripping mushrooms. It’s not a good smell, but an alive one. 

He hums in affirmative and 

wakes up.

He can still smell the lake, though it is drifting away. Feel her thighs as it contorts slowly to the pillow beneath his head. 

The smell of earthy decay lingers in his lizard brain as he turns over. The room he is in is softly dim, unlit but bright enough to see. It’s daytime. An air conditioner runs. The sheets are clean, the mattress lifted. No odors of food or bodies. 

Bruce is gone. 

It doesn’t panic him. He must have shifted from his healing trance, to borrow a Star Trek term, into a more natural sleep. Bruce wouldn’t have left if he wasn’t confident that Harry was safe. 

(he didn’t in Kolkata)

His scalp is itchy with soot. Bruce slathered aloe on his face that’s dried sticky. He’s in sweats and a soft long-sleeve tee. 

Harry gets up. His chest only has a faint twinge. Peeking beneath the bandages (clean ones), he sees it has healed closed, a fresh layer of skin nestled over the new stretch marks. 

Padding to the loo, he sees all his kit laid out, along with complimentary trimmers, hair care, and other toiletries. It’s princely. He can’t really remember being provided with this many throw-away products before. 

He takes a shower in what is practically a steam room. He brings the bin in with him, sits on the tile, and hacks the worst of the stuff from his hair. He doesn’t imagine it’s pretty, but the ragged patches will grow out quick. It always does. His beard he trims and shaves down. This care, more ritual, is familiar to him, and Stark, he assumes, left him with oils and a straight razor in addition to the electric clippers he does not bring into the overly large shower. 

Its luxuriance pulls him back to Bordeaux, to the perfume of Cyril’s lemon tree and the yellowness of the rapeseed fields on the outskirts of the city. Sitting partially inside the splash zone of the shower head, he lets the steam and wetness ground him to the present, clumsy with time. 

He stays under longer, more than needed. Wasting water when the heat doesn’t go out. 

When he stands, his skin is pickled, muscles cramped. 

He cleans the hair from the drain with toilet paper, wipes down the slick tile, and bins it. A toothbrush is packaged along with a porcelain cup and a tube of paste on the marble counter. White hand towels, hair dryer, hand lotions, face soap, hand soap — it’s all a lot. 

The man in the mirror is hollow-eyed and tired, his hair ugly while his beard is frankly chic. Rough living is still stamped on him but he’s progressed from “living in a dumpster” to the “sleeping in internet cafes” level of rough. 

It’s the first time he’s had a good look at himself in… It must be years. 

He pads out naked to the suite. 

His thin, abused lethifold leather looks pathetic next to the soft fabrics someone set aside for him. He pulls on his trousers but pulls on the sweatpants over those, adds a hoodie over the shirt over his lethifold, and keeps the leather footwear which are more flexible than the heavy Timberlands or the slippers offered. 

SHIELD confiscated everything not sewn into his clothing. He needs to resupply his kit probably as soon as possible. 

Amazingly, the door to the room is not locked. Either an egregious oversight (unlikely) or a gracious attempt to assure him he’s not a prisoner. 

He doesn’t think this ritzy house has been properly renovated since the before the 80s. The carpets are Moroccan, the gleaming wood panels made of teak. But, there are moths in the light fixtures, a packed layer of dust foxing the edges of the carpets. Life deserted here. Not even old enough to pick up ghosts. 

Harry peeks inside unlocked rooms — most of them are studies and parlors with tarps down and long brocade curtains covering the windows. The house wraps around to a west-facing landing with dual staircases and an entryway decked in marble tile meant to make shoes echo. 

A grandiose oil painting of a battle with wild-eyed horses in a charge, with white men in military dress and lean rapiers and banners, is fitted where the stairs meet. The gilded frame is even more tarnished than the light fixtures. The picture itself bears down on onlookers. 

Harry hears a wet-sounding crunch.

A man munching an apple walks up from a lower floor, out from under the recess. 

“Yo. You’re awake. Feel better?”

He takes another bite of the apple.

Harry walks down the banister, trying to place the man. He remembers most of the battle up to his decision to pilot the cruiser, not much afterward. The man’s voice is familiar, but his face eludes him. 

The man whistles. “Cleaned up nice,” he says. Wearing his glasses, Harry can see he’s wearing reflective sports shades. His pale skin is touched with neon pink bandaids with rainbow colored cartoons. He’s wearing a uniform, some type of combat gear that’s not the solid black the other SHEILD agents wear, dark purple along the ribs. 

He stares at Harry. “Don’t remember me?”

“You were… in the battle.”

“Yeah.” He transfers the apple to the left hand and offers his other. “Clint. Or Barton. Or Hawkeye. If you prefer.”

“Harry,” Harry says, bowing slightly to avoid the handshake. “Am I still in New York?”

“Yeah.” He crunches on the apple. “Stark’s crib. It’s like a mausoleum.”

“Less dead.”

“Seems pretty dead to me,” Barton misunderstands. 

“You were grey,” Harry recalls. 

Barton stares again, expression neutral. 

“If you call me a pigeon again, I swear to fuck.”

Harry moves on. 

“Where’s Bruce?”

“Stark Tower. Playing with shit, I dunno. He said you’d be fine waking up here.”

Barton seems dubious. 

“Are you my guard?”

Barton stares for a little bit longer, longer than should be normal. He says, “Sure.”

Harry doesn’t question it more. 

Harry follows him into the kitchen. It’s placement in the house establishing a class hierarchy. Beneath the seal of the ground, off to the side through a narrow private hall. It’s average-size for the apparent size of the house, but full of steel ware hung up on racks rather than the traditional appliances Harry expects. Light streams from ground-level windows too narrow to fit more than perhaps a particularly svelte child. The counter is loaded with groceries recently rummaged through. Barton seems to have tossed the perishables in the fridge but left out the rest to be picked at as he chose. 

Harry peers into an open bag of granola. From the look of it, Barton had been sorting chocolate chips and leaving the sugared oats. Harry pops a kernel into his mouth. 

He opens the fridge. 

“Omelette?” Harry asks.

“Pardon?”

“Omelette.” He moves aside so Barton can see the ingredients in the fridge, the ones that won’t keep. 

But Barton just keeps staring at him.

Harry picks out tomatoes, Gruyère cheese, and fresh stalks of spinach. Food doesn’t interest him but he’s been cooking since he was five or six. It seems polite to cook well. Oil, eggs. Salt, pepper. Maybe some rosemary.

Harry cleans all the pans and the bowls, the cutting board and the utensils. 

“Do you need,” Barton says. “uh… cutting?” 

“Dicing,” Harry replies. He scoots a tomato over the counter on a board.

Barton lines up, still a good meter away. He finds his own knife and sets to. 

Soon, the ambient noise fills the space. Cutting, washing, the clacking of dish ware. 

Harry cooks. It must be around 8 in the morning. He probably slept through more than a day. He’d missed the immediate aftermath of the invasion. He vaguely recalls a conversation with Sturnway, the muggle-magic liaison. Probably a bandy of threats that couldn’t be too harsh if Barton is the only person he woke up to. 

“Coffee?” Barton asks. He’s holding a bag of beans. Brazilian.

“Oh. Yes please.”

Coffee, alcohol, chocolate. He doesn’t know why those things still elicit a pleased reaction in him. He’d not the ability to care what he puts in his body as long as it doesn’t poison him. Almost in juxtaposition, he’s developed a palette for bitter chocolates, beers, wines, hard liquors, and plain roasted coffees. It’s maddeningly random. If they have magical properties, he’s damned if he knows what they are. Maybe they are items of worship. He’s sure some magical university grad student has written a paper on it somewhere, somewhen, but maybe it’s just Harry. 

If Barton’s hum of surprise is any indication, the omelettes go over well. Harry gets more from the texture than the taste — it being neither slimy or gritty. 

It’s the espresso which Barton burns to demonic essence that ignites anything appreciative inside him. It’s bad and wonderfully bad, and he holds on his tongue, in the heat, to get all of it that he can out. 

Barton has been firing arrows — that’s right, he’s an archer — into the eyes of priceless portraits to combat boredom. There’s a library but its full of engineering texts and WWII books. A little bit of sheet music but not much. 

“Stark probably went insane in here,” Barton mutters after he finishes their lazy tour. 

Stark’s family is full of brambles. Harry doesn’t say so, but it is in every room. In every silence. The walls here are not violent but they are not loved. 

“Can I go in the city?” Harry asks. 

“Fuck, I’m not actually your babysitter,” Barton grumbles. “I, uh. I shot you, you know.”

Harry recalls something of that regard and a bottle of vodka.

Harry hums

“Hmm?” Barton repeats, tone rising with a suggestion of anger. 

“Will you shoot me if I try to find Bruce?”

Barton’s jaw locks. “No.”

“Then alright.”

Barton follows him to the garage. And he hops into the driver’s seat of a hummer. Harry thinks hummers are tacky, but it is massive and affiliated with the type of people who get to drive through cordons into the city proper. 

The bridges and trains to Manhattan are dead-locked. Only certain personnel are getting in and Barton has a badge. Cars have been cleared, piled up on the sidewalk to make pathways for emergency vehicles and clean-up crews. There aren’t bodies, and volunteers are scattered everywhere, industrious as ants. 

“You wanna call Banner?” Barton asks as he drives, the windows down. “I think if you try Stark you can reach him.”

Barton lets him use the Samsung, the SHIELD operations one. Calling reception gets an automated response. It takes nearly an half an hour pressing buttons for machines when he at last hears a voice somewhere between man and robot. 

_“This is the Stark Industries main public line. Thank you for your patience. To whom may I direct your call?”_

“Er. Bruce. Banner.”

_“And who is calling please?”_

“Harry Hartson.”

_“One moment.”_

Harry does not expect one moment to actually be one moment, so he’s startled when the line clicks and Bruce’s awkward, distracted voice comes down the line.

_“Yes, hello? Hello?”_

“Bruce.”

_“Harry.”_

He hears something being set down. 

_“You’re up? Are you alright?”_

“Yes,” Harry says and has no idea what else to say. “How are you?”

Bruce snorts, and mutters something unkind in Portuguese, though his tone is soft. _“Fine. Are you sore? Breathing well? Swelling? Fever?”_

“No fever. No swelling. Typical soreness. Breathing normal.”

_“Any seizures? Symptoms?”_

“No.”

_“Did you eat?”_

“Yes.”

Bruce then calls him a bastard in Spanish. Harry’s listening ability is better than his speaking. Bruce uses different synonyms for stupid and reckless for two and a half minutes, modulating his tone so he doesn’t actually get too angry and shift. The diatribe dissolves into just him asking why over and again. Bruce has picked up whatever he is working on to keeping himself marginally distracted. 

“It was efficient,” Harry says in Spanish. Interestingly enough, Bruce speaks with a Portuguese accent while Hulk doesn’t. Harry’s accent is atrociously nasal. 

_“It was dumb. That son of a dog on the phone reamed you out. It got you in trouble. My God, if you had to get involved, you could have stayed on the ground.”_

Harry sticks out his tongue, which Bruce cannot see. Bruce mistakes the silence and sighs. 

_“I’ve got to go,”_ he says in English. _“Will you just… stay where you are and not get in trouble?”_

Harry glances at the road. “Alright.”

Bruce hangs up. 

Harry places the phone in the cupholder and considers his options. 

“We aren’t going to the Tower?” Barton intuits. 

Where is the most death?

“Can you take me to the hospital?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I figured out how to make a work skin to get that font size effect for the song! Don't mean to interrupt ya'll's reading experience, but I have never written script (this was CSS) in my life and I'm kinda of proud. Thank you everyone for the comments, especially the ones commenting on every chapter, because it is absolutely because of you that I google searched and read the tutorials to do that and I'm just... (๑•̀ㅂ•́)و✧ I am so happy to learn something new, and I hope y'all liked it!


	16. So dawn goes down to day. Nothing gold can stay. (Part 1)

Harry has seen worse. But it’s not good either.

The hospital is understaffed and drooling patients into the halls and the lawn. 

Harry is not a medical professional by any stretch of the imagination, but he trained as an auror, brief though that year and a half were. Part of that training was field medicine, but mostly it was learning to keep his head when people clipped orders at him. He’s attended Bruce, not-that-kind-of-doctor, in emergency clinics, has a hard stomach against stress and injury, and knows how to fill in the gaps. 

Harry nicks some scrubs and a volunteer badge (true enough) and steps into the organized chaos. 

On the third-ish day post-invasion, there are still patients with visible burn wounds and crushed limbs triaged in hastily erected tents in the courtyard, assigned to beds. People are constantly being moved. Harry strips off dirty sheets, cleans bedpans, and shuffles supples to steady hands. He carts coffee and soup and water, blankets and pillows, and separates grieving loved ones from the clogged pathways. 

More than twenty-four hours later — after a catered set of chips and a turkey sandwich, and two thirty-minute naps — Harry is asked to transfer a body down to the morgue. 

Compared to the crises above, the basement is fearsomely calm. It’s cold and silent.

Harry peeks in the office and spots a woman sleeping on a cot under her lab coat. 

Harry arranges the gruesome line-up, stands aside, and Turns the ring. 

The souls appear next to their corpses. They look whole and real. He can make out the shadows of the oppressive hospital light on their skin. Most are looking down at their bodies in faint disgruntlement or resignation, noses scrunched or arms crossed. They touch the sheets though. They don’t touch the world at all. 

Harry takes a sticky notepad and pen from the morgue-lady’s desk and approaches the first man. The unclaimed bodies, the ones without id, are missing tags. He and souls both treat the interaction like an interview. Harry fills out the information, the next of kin, if there are any. 

The souls despite their fresh deaths don’t seem disturbed. Some are rueful. Some are upset about their loved ones. But they are by and large polite, emotionally removed from the chaos of life, a memory of biology. Most of these people at least had not languished in their dying. They had either died quickly or surrounded by the nurses trying to save them, in pain but touched by the professional courtesy of people who wanted to save them. 

After fifty or so, Harry thumbs his eyes. 

He made note that the security cameras were in the hall but not in the morgue. All he needs is access to a computer on the hospital server to suggest that the cameras were undergoing maintenance when he entered. The system backtracks. It doesn’t erase the info so much as forgets it was there in the first place. It’s not a spell, but unless someone already downloaded the footage, it’s gone like it never existed. 

He logs the data he collected on the program the doctor uses, submits it, and tidies the bodies in the lockers. 

People, Harry has learned, form their own assumptions about mysteries like this. The doctor will either assume she got more work done in her sleep-deprived binge than expected, or that someone else managed to id the bodies while she was out, which is technically true. 

Not bothering to edit the security footage again, Harry sets himself against one of the newly empty trolleys. He Pulls the Invisibility Cloak over himself and sets to doze until someone returns to open the doors.

\- — — — -

By the time Harry emerges from the hospital, the sky tells him the afternoon is sinking into evening.

After hours of cold and silence, the hospital itself is hideously rancorous. He thinks maybe one hour at the most got lost while he crouched sleepily by the door in the morgue. He feels a latent urge to crack his spine, even though his spine doesn’t do that anymore. Hasn’t for ten-odd years. He stretches upwards instead, groggy, and finds a bench. 

Not five minutes later, a customer from the Starbucks across the street walks over. He has a tray of to-go drinks and a brown bag and sits right beside Harry. 

“Muffin,” Coulson offers. 

Coulson sets it on the bench when Harry doesn’t move to take it and ruffles through the bag. 

“Is this a bribe muffin?”

“If you like. You did feed my agent.”

Harry considers him 

“Earl grey,” Coulson says, pointing to one cup. “Sumatra,” he says of the other.

Despite the lure of coffee beans, Harry’s not sure his stomach can handle it. He takes the earl grey. The cup is warm. He can feel the weight of the two bags inside, jostled. He opens the lid, and it smells normal, looks normal, without sediment at the bottom. 

“You’re quite paranoid,” Coulson comments and licks a crumb of biscuit off his thumb. 

Vigilant, Harry corrects silently. In ode. 

He eats the muffin anyway. 

“What do you want?” Harry asks. 

“I would like a debrief,” Coulson says. “I guess you can call it a witness statement though. You were unaccounted for for several hours in Loki’s custody.”

“And?” Harry asks.

“And some accounting of what-”

“No, I mean... you want the debriefing. And what else?”

Coulson is silent a moment. 

“What Nick is trying to do,” he says. “He put me in the position of liaison. That’s something I invest a lot of pride in. I have hope, for this team we’re making.”

Harry looks at him. Coulson’s attention is somewhere beyond the present, to a distance Harry, wreathed in death, can’t see. 

“I’m not interested in obstructing that,” Harry says.

“I see that,” Coulson, cryptically, says. 

They sit in silence as Harry coaxes his belly to accept the sweet heaviness of the cake.

Harry narrates what he recalls of his captivity, but it’s disjointed. Coulson helps him fix it in his memory, and it unspools as he talks about it.

“Did you get a read on Loki’s emotional state?” Coulson asks.

“Yes. He was wild and very angry.”

“Hmm. But at that point, the invasion was going very well for him.” The tone is leading.

Harry picks apart the muffin, eating small bites. “I’m not sure he was interested in the invasion.”

“Explain,” Coulson asks, neither judging or demanding. 

Harry looks at the sidewalk. 

“I noticed him displaying symptoms similar to the compromised agents I saw on the helicarrier. Dilated pupils, fatigue. I provoked him. His responses were…” He struggles for a word. “Strained.”

“These could be biological responses, or his personality. I assume you are not familiar with alien physiologies, or Loki’s personal one.”

“Steve commented that the scepter could be a communication tool, a means of Loki communicating back with the invasion force.”

“And?”

“And I made a comment, about someone being on the other side. Someone watching. I don’t think I was wrong.”

Coulson hums. “This is not evidence.”

“I’ve been wrong before.”

“And your final opinion?” Coulson says, watching. Discerning. 

Harry breathes. 

“I think someone tortured him and used the scepter on him. But I also think he turned their attention to Earth on purpose, as a means of escape. I think he didn’t mind sacrificing whoever was down here. If it meant he could get away. But also if it meant betraying the people who hurt him.”

“You think he might have even _self-sabotaged_ the invasion?” Coulson says, finally showing some surprise though Harry’s not convinced it’s genuine. 

He shrugs. “Depends on how petty he is. And if he thought he could away with it.” Harry hesitates then admits, “If I was forced to help my captors, I’d do everything I could to make them fail. I guess it all depends on whether or not he was willing.”

Coulson hums, his eyes are bright. 

Harry doesn’t know if Coulson believes him. He’s washing his hands of the affair, getting damn close to politics again. 

They sit for a while longer, finishing their drinks. 

Coulson bins the containers and offers a folded envelope onto the bench with a bland.

Harry takes it. Inside is a yellow and blue metro card and a slim black phone. It has a SI logo on the back instead of the more well known Apple. It doesn’t feel very sturdy.

“There’s a debit card in the case. Stark set you up with an account. And SHIELD’s pay for your help in the invasion.”

Harry gives him a look, but Coulson is entirely expressionless.

Harry presses the open key and getting asked to set up a passcode. 

“This is a horrible thing to give me.”

“Do you think you will get into less trouble without it?” Coulson asks, too knowing.

The background is an illustration of Stark’s Iron Man helmet. It is red and yellow with sky-blue eye-holes. The phone comes installed with a list of contacts including “Agent Agent” alongside a security-captured image of Coulson’s unhappy side-eye, “Brucie Bear” with a Teddy Bear photoshopped green, and “Madly Handsome Debonair Genius Philanthropist” with a brown goatee and a swoopy head of hair on a red background. Within seconds of looking at it, the icon shows a series of dots and a balloon pops up.

_welcome 2 modern age!_

-and a series of emojis Harry can’t decipher. 

Harry is fairly sure Stark is pretending to understand a language of hieroglyphics but doing the equivalent of a keyboard smash. 

Holding up the phone, Harry gives Coulson another look. Coulson responds with a huff that is a shade too amused to be realistically sympathetic.

After careful contemplation of the options, Harry finds a green swatch, the teddy bear, and a question mark and presses send.

Stark responds with a... crying face, a phone, a ring, a red exclamation mark, and a thumbs up. It’s remarkably juvenile but also somehow less awkward than text. 

Harry taps back to the call list and calls the green bear.

It picks up after two rings.

“ _Hello?_ ” comes Bruce’s high-lilted, confused voice.

“Hey. Stark gave me a phone.” This seems important, as last time Harry and Barton got waived through a lot of automated services for over half an hour.

“ _Yeah. He gave me one too_ ,” Bruce says. 

Like yesterday (yesterday?), Bruce sounds distracted. Not quite as rushed or angry though, so Harry sits in the comfortable weight of him fiddling with lab stuff. Bruce’s clothes rustle against the receiver as he moves.

Gradually, the sound of movement stills. 

“ _I missed you at the mansion._ ”

“Mm,” Harry affirms. He watches a couple at the Starbucks. 

“ _I shouldn’t have left you alone so long_ ,” Bruce says after a moment. “ _Where did you go?_ ”

“Hospital.”

“ _You… hate hospitals_.”

“Smells like cages,” he agrees. The two sitting at the patio furniture are laughing. “Chitauri?” Harry asks, by which he means _Are you working on the Chitauri remains and have you unlocked their mysterious bionic origins?_

“ _Y-yeah_ ,” Bruce says. “ _Actually, I think I’m wrapping up. Have you eaten?_ ”

“Agent Coulson gave me a muffin. I had a sandwich in the hospital. I made omelettes with Barton.”

“ _Harry, have you been with SHEILD agents all day?_ ”

Bruce sounds faintly amused (and worried of course) so Harry doesn’t ruin it by saying _No, I’ve been talking to dead people_. He makes a sound that could mean anything, still watching the couple. 

“ _Harry?_ ” Bruce has started to sound suspicious. “ _What are you doing?_ ”

“Watching two people trying to have sex.”

Coulson chokes, spitting coffee over his lid. He leans it away from him before it can get on his suit, bunching up napkins

Bruce likewise sounds appalled and amused.

“ _Aren’t you in a hospital?_ ”

“They’re at the Starbucks,” Harry says.

“ _Oh, okay then_ ,” Bruce says dry. 

Harry doesn’t mention that the female-presenting one is not human. She’s a kappa. She’s in scrubs, talking to a man likewise in scrubs on the other side of her. Harry had been wondering if she was out hunting, but she frankly isn’t putting out suck-out-your-intestines-through-your-arse vibes. Her voluminous hair is coiffed right up on the top of her head to hide the bowl where water would be kept. Her eyes, tinted with a hummingbird glimmer of green, haven’t shifted one inch from the man to notice the wizard-shaped person watching. She’s not alert. She’s not focused on anyone but the muggle chatting her up who doesn’t seem to notice her lake-green pallor. They are quietly adoring, drawn into the worlds of each other.

It is difficult for their kind to live here, but it is difficult for a lot of people, for a lot of different reasons. Spirits like kappa — or monsters or demons or gods, or whatever you want to call them — give up power to love humans. There are beings like her that somehow survived the extinction of industrialization, beings like the vila who keep to the In-between, and those Under the Mounds, where the gates should be **Shut**.

“ _Harry?_ ” Bruce calls.

“Hm?”

“ _Dinner_.”

There is an edge like Bruce is repeating himself.

“I haven’t made anything.”

This time, Bruce’s sigh is loud. He says each following word slowly, like he’s talking to a slow child.

“ _I am asking to eat out._ ”

Harry opens his mouth. 

“ _With you._ ”

Harry closes his mouth.

“Oh.” He drops his gaze from the couple. “You don’t want to work?”

“ _I_ can _take breaks._ ”

“What about Stark?”

“ _What about him?_ ”

“Don’t you want to eat with Stark?”

“ _Harry, I need you to explain your thought process._ ”

“You like Stark.”

“ _Yeah?_ ”

“Stark likes you.”

“ _Yeah?_ ” Bruce says in a higher, more perturbed volume. 

“Why would you eat with me when you can eat with Stark?”

“… _I don’t even know where to begin with that. Jesus. Ok. You know I like you too. That’s kind of our deal._ ”

“Yes. But Stark is smart. I thought you would want to talk to him more than me.”

The pause is longer this time. “ _Are you being self-deprecating or are you trying to be considerate?_ ”

Harry blinks. He and Bruce both, through trail and error, have learned Bruce needs to ask really blunt questions when Bruce gets lost trying to understand Harry’s intentions and when Harry thinks he is being straightforward. 

“Considerate?” Harry picks from the two options. 

Bruce’s sigh ruffles with static. 

“ _How about this? Tony needs a break too. He can eat with both of us_ ,” Bruce says.

Harry’s not really interested in eating with Stark, but he also does not care. 

He lowers the phone. “Food?” he asks Coulson. 

Coulson’s expression is bland, but the crinkles around his eyes seem amused for some reason. “No. I’m good.”

Harry searches the courtyard until he can pinpoint the agent hanging off the balcony of the car deck. Rather, lounging on it. Harry holds up the phone, points, and mimes eating. 

After a second with a tilted head, the agent gives back a thumbs up and hops back into the shadow. 

“Barton’s coming,” he tells the phone.

“ _Why?_ ” Bruce asks. 

Why Stark?

“Because he’s following me.”

“ _Tony’s mid-life crisis car only has two real seats_.” Harry hears Stark affronted reply in the background as Bruce continues, “ _You and Clint are going to have to take the bucket seats. I call shotgun._ ”

“Baron drove. We can meet where we’re eating.”

A door opens and closes in an echoing space over the line. 

“ _Do I need to worry about you and Clint?_ ” Bruce asks, censure in the tone.

“Because he shot me?”

“ _He_ **what**?”

Oh. Erm.

“Why else would I worry about Barton?”

“ _He’s a SHIELD agent_ ,” Bruce hisses. “ _But that is not what I meant._ ”

Harry has to parse that over for a moment. Oh.

“You mean sexually?”

Bruce gives another of those tiny breaths he doesn’t like to admit are repressed sighs. “ _Never mind. Never mind. Please. Forget I asked._ ”

“Any agent having sex with you would be very unprofessional,” Coulson speaks up as Barton exits the garage. 

“Agent Coulson says it’s not allowed,” Harry informs Bruce. 

“ _Oh my god_ ,” Bruce says over the phone. 

Barton is laughing as he saunters forward. “What conversation are y’all having?”

“An enlightening one,” Coulson says, standing to apparently switch roles. 

“What preferences do you have?” Harry asks Barton.

Barton leers. “I’m up for anything.”

“For food.”

“Oh. Pizza,” he says.

“How does Stark feel about pizza?”

“ _Stark wants to hear the rest of the previous conversation_ ,” Stark’s voice comes clearly over the device. 

“Calm down, Hugh Hefner. Let’s focus on lunch,” Bruce says, not entirely playful. Harry’s sure Stark is getting a hairy eyeball. 

Taking a note from Bruce’s tone earlier, Harry asks, “Are you being protective or prudish?” 

“ _Puta_ ,” Bruce grumps at him. 

Abruptly and out of nowhere, the force of Bruce’s affection hits Harry through the receiver. 

Because Bruce could give two shits about sex work, because he treats sex workers, and their injuries when they allow Bruce to care for them, with the utmost care and respect. 

But _Harry_ somehow exists in the space where Bruce knows it is safe to tease him, where Bruce worries, where his care is personal and devoted, and Bruce knows his words will be understood because they _know_ each other. 

Bruce’s love comes spiky. With defensive wounds and claws he’s sheared down to nubs. 

He’s terrified of hurting people.

He knows he won’t hurt Harry. 

The ricochet rumbles through Harry, out from his (empty, _starving_ ) chest. It drags a smile out of him, a tired little thing, that Harry cups his hand over, trying to keep it safe. 

“I do love you so.”

Bruce hangs up. It’s a blatant act of self-preservation and makes Harry actually want to laugh again. He doesn’t, but he bathes in it. In the fleeting warmth even as it grays. 

Nothing gold can stay.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Title and last line from Robert Frost's "Nothing Gold Can Stay."


	17. Interlude - Clint (Part 1)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This one is short, but I'm giving you Clint's POV. I hope that evens it out a little.

Interlude

.:Clint:.

While Bruce busily tries to hide a blush from Stark’s teasing in a model corvette, Clint decides that a) Harry Hartson is the weirdest fucking person he has ever met, and b) he might possibly have to adopt him. 

Harry is so survival-small that Clint could possibly actually put him in a suitcase. He is, now that he’s got a trim, objectively good-looking, but in a way that makes you want to feed him. He’s little and polite and fucking patient as all fuck. Quiet, but in a way that doesn’t make Clint want to fill it, doesn’t get him itchy. He also looks _tired_. 

Clint wants to not like him. Really. He’s dangerous. (So was Nat.) And suspicious as fuck. (So was _Nat_.) But Clint has also spent the last thirty-something hours studying the world-washed weight of him. His eyes sleepy like an old lonely hound. He’s got a gorgeous jawline and stunning eyes, but he doesn’t look people in the actual eye because then it’s fucking creepy. Because they are kind of dead. Lose the nerve endings dead. But Harry seems to _know_ that. He seems to be _sparing_ people _discomfort_ by looking at everything else in the slow considering way of a damn monk. 

Even though Clint has seen him executing Chitauri with rebar. Even though Clint has seen him fly like _hellspawn_ under collapsing skyscraper. Even though he casually promised to _skin_ General Ross and then look at him like… well… like it would hardly be different than skinning an apple. 

Empathy and apathy. Which one? 

And the morgue. 

The fucking morgue.

It had chilled Clint to the bone. His eyes kept sharpening. Kept wanting to see _nothing that was there_. That isn’t ok. That is danger-danger Will Robinson. That’s the corn field Clint is fucking _not_ getting into. He’s too old to be thinking about Heaven and Hell and _where souls go_. He’s killed too many people to find that at all comforting. So he’d turned over in front of that little vent that he’d unscrewed in the maintenance closet next door. He’d retracted his mirror stick and he’d listened to the _sound_ , which he never does (being partially deaf in one ear and full-on deaf in the other). But the sound made a little more sense and he can’t deal with his senses tricking him. Not right now. He just can’t. 

He’d heard Hartson sneak out when some other doctor came in, followed the tracer in his hood, and decided he’s not going to think about it until he debriefs with Phil. He’s not talking to anyone else. No fucking way.

Even with all _that_ , it’s hard to be scared of _Harry_. He’s this awkward, weird, starving hobo that made him omelettes. Like anybody at all ever has made him home-cooked food after his mom. He _poured vodka_ over Loki because Loki was _mean_.

He’s so fucking weird.

Before he cut his hair and hacked off that beard, no, Clint could not imagine anyone not desperate wanting to have sex with him. Now, he doesn’t want to imagine the kind of people who would find his small vulnerability and loneliness tempting. Because Harry Hartson looks either like someone you want to protect or someone you want to _break_ , and that is fucking terrifying. 

And still, after listening to Bruce Banner call him a slut, Clint thinks he might understand how Harry could break someone’s heart. Because that smile, soft and shy, had been _something_. A ghost of mischief and humor and _life_.

And yeah. 

Clint doesn’t want to think about whoever ruined that. Because he’s gonna get pissed. And that shit’s ineffective. 

Clint meets Phil’s eye and thinks _this is going to be trouble_. Because it was trouble the last time he felt this way and that was Nat, who had also saved his life after he’s done something inexcusably dumb and instead of breaking him took him in and let him go when he needed it. He’d brought her into SHIELD because she let him bring her into SHIELD, because it was better than the contracts she was taking and he loved her, and maybe just a little, she loved him. 

Because Nat was lost, and trained to be cruel, and didn’t have a purpose she thought good enough to fight for. 

And Harry is looking lost, and like he was trained to be savage, and he lacks a purpose in life that isn’t following Banner into sketchy aircrafts to make sure he doesn’t get shot. 

He wants to think that Harry is trustworthy, and that’s dangerous. It’s not just the guilt talking. And that’s _more_ dangerous. 

He hears Harry say, “I’ve never had pizza,” and loses his train of thought.

“Fucking get out,” Clint says.

The remnants of that smile are already fading. “Pardon?”

“You’re shitting me.” They walk towards the jeep. 

Harry turns, because his manners are five-star, and looks back at Phil. “Agent Coulson.”

“Mr. Hartson.” Phil sounds just as polite, but Clint can detect a hint of him being charmed. Which shouldn’t surprise him. Phil gets charmed by Clint occasionally so he knows his taste is trash.

In the Hummer, Harry looks at Clint for permission, hand hovering over the dial on the radio.

Fuck. Fucking fuck.

He’s gonna end up liking this guy. 


	18. Exit, Pursued by Bear (Part 1)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey! I've been updating regularly, so I want to let the ones following this story know that I'm taking a 1-3 day break. I realized there is another interlude that I want to write that I think the story needs. I'm going to take 1-3 days to draft and edit and play around with it. If at the end of 3 days I'm not satisfied with what I have, I'll go ahead and post the next chapter, which is already written. 
> 
> In other words, there will be a Chapter 19 post no later than July 6 no matter what. That's the deadline I'm setting for myself. 
> 
> Please enjoy!

The restaurant Stark takes them to beyond the Manhattan cordons is kitschy. Patched booths and wobbly tables, quaint murals of vines and sun-drenched hills, paper napkins, and absolutely strangled with people eating and laughing. Shelter volunteers in lime green shirts, construction workers in cement-crusted work boots among the other thoroughfare threaded with waiters. The atmosphere exudes a friendly camaraderie the comes with good, greasy food. 

It’s not the place Harry expected. 

Stark swans to them, shoving his sunglasses in his breast pocket. 

He’s still in a Ford jacket but it is hastily thrown over a dark work tee, sweat and oil pricking up his hair. His hands are stained, as are his jeans and sneakers. Teeth glint behind his lips as he hustles them over.

The seater when she sees him lights up. “Mr. Tony!”

She bustles them with menus through the crowd. They nearly get jostled by elbows, but they find a pocket of space at a table crammed at the end of a vacant section of the bar. The screens above the bar show baseball. Laughter spills around them. Harry gives Bruce the corner, a bit more isolated from the noise and energy.

Tony falls into the seat sideways and Clint cants his chair against a section of wall, all of it performed adroitly as if they weren’t making sure they could cover the corners of the room and vault into the kitchen if they need an easy exit.

“Thanks, Annie,” Tony says. He barely glances at the menu. “Can you get us one full of meat, one full of veggies - vegetarian - and whatever Anthony’s making.”

Her expression falls slightly. “Oh, I’m sorry, Tony, but Anthony…”

She trails off, the unsaid understood. Tony doesn’t even blink.

“Then whatever your favorite is.”

She nods with a wobbly smile, taking the menus back. “He didn’t- You know. Just family. Espresso?”

Stark plants an elbow on the table to look at her on top of his knuckles. “Read my mind.”

She boxes his shoulder gently with the menu, expression grateful, before gliding through the throng. 

“I’m shocked, Stark,” Barton remarks, smirking.

“By what?” Stark asks with a sharp edge like industrial steel around his grin.

Barton gestures around the place. “Not too low brow for you?”

Stark relaxes a little. “Grease is God’s gift to dining.”

“No argument here. My constitution ain’t delicate.”

“Was that directed at me?” Bruce wonders glibly. 

The conversation rolls, gaining momentum as waters, a ginger ale, and the espressos hit the table with an appetizer of potato wedges. 

Harry lets all of it flow over him, the wispy edges of death in the hospital diluting in the good cheer and somewhat technical jargon of what’s happening around the city. They don’t speak bluntly about SHIELD, but it’s not a difficult innuendo to parse. 

No one tries to drag Harry into the exchange, Bruce making short poignant quips as the other two men seem satisfied to probingly needle each other.

It’s all absolutely fine until Harry catches an edge of red robe out of his direct line of sight. 

Picking up a water from the litter of drinks, Harry manages to pretend he didn’t see them. 

Dalton has his legs stretched out under a table opposite a witch in the brighter red vest of a greenhorn. Dalton’s brownish-red auror robes are glamoured into an ugly tweed suit, but his loafers have the odd point of elf-make. The witch’s skirts and bowler hat are both out of date from different decades. Not very conspicuous unless one knows, as Harry does, how to spot the MoM’s notoriously shabby police force.

They have food in front of them, but they aren’t eating. Despite the hubbub of activity, they aren’t doing much of anything but stirring their straws in their untouched drinks. 

Barton shuffles in his seat, his foot nudging Harry’s under the table.

“So, who are they?” he asks as he if had been waiting for Harry to notice them too.

Harry sets down the drink, his fingers running along the marbled edge before he sets his hands in his lap.

“They from that dick on the phone?” Stark asks, having noticed them before Harry as well. 

Stark wriggles in his seat and glances right at them, provocative in the extreme. Dalton looks up, andStark waggles his fingers before turning back around. 

“Dangerous?” Stark asks, sipping the pretty golden bubbles of ginger ale. It’s a question so absolutely, purposefully late that Harry contemplates bloodshed. 

It’s breathtaking, how carelessly reckless Stark is. Like he would rather win any reaction, even a very bad one, than be out of the know. 

Dalton and the new witch are no longer pretending to ignore them, and Harry cannot pretend to ignore them either.

Harry wipes his fingers on a napkin.

Bruce clamps a hand on his forearm before he can rise. “Wait. Just wait.” He tries to breathe evenly. “That man on the phone threatened you.”

_Are you safe? Tell me you’re safe._

But Harry doesn’t know. He never knows if he’s safe. It’s always possible, at all times, that someone will want something from Harry that he is unwilling to give. It’s always a threat. 

“Let go.”

Slowly, unwillingly, Bruce does so, staring into his eyes. 

He doesn’t say anything else. 

Passing by him, Barton palms a small device into Harry’s hand. Without looking or thinking too much about it, he slips it into the hem of his sweatpants. 

Harry parks himself in one of the chairs on Dalton’s right and shoves his hands in his pocket. 

“What?”

“Don’t what me,” Dalton says. “Up and screwed the pooch, you did.”

“I did not. You all are the ones calling more attention to yourselves-”

“I’d keep my mouth shut if I were you,” Dalton warns. 

The witch leans over the table. “Expected you to be more tarted up. You pick up many of ‘em like that?”

He’s used to the sneer and the condescendence. “Why? You need one rubbed off?”

Her nostrils flare in disgust.

“Bailey,” Dalton reprimands, tone bland. He addresses Harry, “We just need you to come in is all. The biannual one.”

Harry doesn’t know why he bothers to argue, but…

“You’re early.”

“Well, that’s your own fault.”

“It’s unnecessary.”

“My heart bleeds, truly.”

“You’re a fooking murderer,” the witch, Bailey, says. “Lucky you don’t get the cross. Only getting these check ups twice a year. Just to make sure you’re not naughty.”

“You’re rather vile,” Harry notes. 

Dalton grabs Harry’s shoulder. He puts his hand at the crevice of his neck leaning in so his body blocks the view from the rest of the restaurant. Harry feels part himself, his engagement, retreat under the force. It doesn’t hurt. It doesn’t even really feel like a hand, but like a memory, pushing him further somehow away from his skin. 

Dalton just lets his hand rest there before releasing him with a friendly pat. 

“None of that legilimency shit now. Just sign the papers.”

Dalton plants them on the table with a small quill. Harry looks at the form.

“No.”

“Excuse me,” Dalton drawls while Bailey starts to chuckle giddily.

“That’s not my barrister.”

“S’who we had on short notice.”

“That really isn’t my problem. I have a right to my barrister.”

Dalton doesn’t bother trying to stare him down. He just waits, but in this case, Harry is unmovable. 

The Ministry has tried to get sly with this before. Harry had refused them then and been placed in a holding cell while the ‘matter could get resolved.’ He’d mysteriously gotten food poisoning, been refused medical attention, or privacy. Mr. Cho had sued the department, not for the poisoning which could not be proven malicious but for the lack of aid. It had cost them some pretty galleons. Some scapegoat got fired. They snigger over the memory. Sometimes they use it to threaten him, all smarmy smiles, but they haven’t done it again. 

“Gotta get my superior to sign off on it,” Dalton says. 

“Please,” Harry replies. 

Bailey calls him something foul. Something is wrong with the auror department, if her viciousness hasn’t been evidenced as a problem. She said it low enough that Dalton doesn’t reprimand her but not low enough he couldn’t hear. Politics have been shifting after the first years since the war. Her character is not new, but it is certainly more openly offensive than expected. 

“We’d still like you to come in,” Dalton says, like he’s giving Harry a choice. “You can wait while we get the signatures in order.”

Harry doesn’t imagine, after listening to this conversation on that bug, that Bruce is going to let him leave the mansion without a bodyguard. 

“Sure,” Harry says. 

Unruffled, Dalton gathers the papers, and they stand. 

Barton will follow. If the aurors realize, they will obliviate him. 

“I’ll say goodbye to my table.”

Bailey catches his arm. Her grip, unlike Dalton’s subtle one, is more intentionally painful. Harry lets is hurt. 

“Nothing funny, yeah. We’ll be waiting.”

She releases him with a smirk, and makes a motion like she’s wiping her hands off on her skirt as he walks away. 

“I’ll be off for a few days,” he informs the entirety of the table.

“Hartson,” Stark starts. 

“I’d appreciate it, Mr. Stark. If you didn’t speak to me.” And find a way to learn some restraint. 

Harry startles everyone by leaning over like he plans to kiss Barton.

In the ear facing the crowd but hidden by Harry’s shoulder, he says, “If you want to keep your memory, don’t let them catch you following.”

He returns the bug, only the one most evident of the others Barton has hidden on his person. 

When he pulls away, Barton has pasted on a heated leer and hovers his hand around Harry’s baggy jacket without touching his waist. “Don’t be too long then.”

“Two days max,” Harry says. 

It’s shitty. Barton, already under friendly fire, will come under more suspicion when the trackers on Harry fail. There is nothing Harry can do about that. Nothing that Barton can do but follow and nothing Harry can do let him get hurt. 

The aurors take him out to a black saloon that pulls up as soon as they exit the restaurant. A poppet is driving, and Bailey commands it to go to the English consulate. Good. 

Barton will be less ostracized if there is evidence of some bureaucratic finagling. Losing Harry in the bowels of an embassy is different than trying to argue he saw three people enter a public toilet and never come out. 

“You shouldn’t get so close with them,” Bailey says. It is less lewd than her other comments but carries the same hateful tone. 

“Their money is as good as anyone else’s.”

She sneers at him. “I guess shite attracts shite.”

“They aren’t. You’re just a bigot.”

“I beg your fooking pardon.”

“Bailey, calm down. And you, shut it. I’ll gag you you wanna start trouble.” 

Harry doesn’t bother arguing, knowing it will only make matters worse for him. 

Harry hopes this will only take two days. If it’s more than two, something will be very wrong. Bruce will also lose his collective mind and there will be nothing to be done about it. Harry will either come out of this on his own, thanks to Cho, or he won’t. 

The poppet maneuvers them magically through the intersections. The consulate received damage during the invasion, as all the buildings did. Cranes and scaffolding already cloak it, but they are suspiciously silent. Rather than a parking garage, they drive through blue tarp into the empty foyer. They step out, and Dalton leads the way to the emergency staircase. 

As soon as the door shuts behind them, he banishes the pushing mechanism the muggles favor for public buildings and roots a door knob out of his robes. It’s old brass with a glass handle. He fixes it on the smooth surface of the door. It latches, blinking at them innocently, and Bailey hands him a key. 

The door opens. One of the Ministry’s holding cells lies on the other side. They step in. Dalton retrieves the doorknob. After the door closes, as soon as the latch safely _snicks_ , another auror opens it from inside the Ministry. There are offices and sound. Harry smells the once familiar presence of owls — their dusty feather-oil scent that clung to his people — the distinctive burn of spellcraft on stone — cleaning, recycling ink, cutting the keratin on quill tips. It washes over him while Dalton and Bailey step through the door. Then it’s gone and he’s alone. 

Harry sits down on the bunk, a slab cut from the wall. It doesn’t have bedding, which he hopes means they aren’t willing to keep him long. There is a hole in the corner. It’s clean for the moment, but the smell still comes up from the pipes. It look infinitely dark and is not the most comfortable thing to dangle your bits over. He knows the wall where the door is can go see-through and do so without alerting the inhabitant. No window. No color and endless light. 

With an inhale and an exhale, Harry prepares himself to wait and goes to sleep. 

\- — — — -

When they get off the subway, Harry’s phone, previously a black slab, buzzes. He’s surprised it’s alive at all honestly. The wards on the holding cell prevent all external magic so no one bothered to search him, but not wanting to draw any attention to it, Harry hadn’t checked it either. It spazzes erratically in his pocket, sending a poor hail mary. Harry thumbs to the lock-screen before it glitches. The battery jumps from 92% to 3% abruptly before the screen glitches again and then goes black.

Well, darn. 

Harry is still a little nauseous from the veritiserum anecdote. It was 11pm in London but the sun in New York tells him it is early evening, about two hours until dusk. The traffic is terrifically congested, and Harry has to grab hold of Mr. Cho’s sleeve to keep them together as they flood towards the exit.

Mr. Cho follows sedately, moving adroitly with the traffic. In the street, they insert themselves near a bike stand out of the flow so Harry can figure their heading.

“Do you know where you’re going?”

“Relatively,” Harry replies, looking at the street for landmarks he might remember from running around during the invasion. Even with most the buildings decapitated he can’t immediately locate Stark Tower.

They meander until Harry spots a park. A person on a bench kindly give them directions to the Tower. Rather than wander in and suffer the hassle of security, Harry finds a pay phone and tricks the electronics to let him dial Bruce’s new number. 

It picks up on the second ring. Bruce sounds anxious. “ _Hello?_ ”

“Hey, Bruce.”

“ _Harry_ ,” he exhales. “ _Where are you?_ ”

Harry rattles an address, which Bruce interrupts at the end with, “ _That’s three blocks from the Tower._ ”

“I was hoping you’d stayed there,” Harry admits, cradling the somewhat sticky phone to his ear. “I’ll be there shortly if that’s alright.”

“ _Yes,_ ” is all Bruce says. 

“I have a guest.”

Bruce’s voice goes high. “ _Really? Are you… Okay?_ ”

Unsure how to adequately describe his relationship with his barrister, Harry manages, “He’s good,” before Bruce works himself into a tizzy. “Meet you at the Tower,” Harry says and hangs up. 

Harry escorts Mr. Cho through the scarred city. Roads cut off for service operations tending the perforated sewer systems, some buildings still being scraped off the streets, it is a winding way they have to take to reach the entrance of the Tower. The base itself is crammed with many more people than expected. 

No longer home operations for SHIELD, Stark apparently opened it to house the misplaced — those waiting on their apartments to get cleared or the countless laborers organizing the relief shifts. The Tower itself is ridiculously amenable to emergency houses. It has an employee gym, Harry reads on a directional sign, with open showers and bathroom facilities, an open conference room for a daycare center, and a canteen with free meals for a card-swipe that people can register for at the massively extended front desk. 

Harry, flabbergasted, stands in the entrance like a git until a worker marches up to him.

“Hello, I’m Kandra. Can I help you?”

“Er. I’m… Harry… Hartson.”

“Oh. Mr. Stark said to send you up.”

She herds them to a desk, hands them color-coded badges on lanyards, and ushers them to the elevators.

“Use these across the keypad to get to the top thirty floors. Mr. Stark is on floor 62. I’ll tell him you’ve arrived.”

Harry gets onto the lift. Mr. Cho hops, looking intrigued. After the doors shut, Harry stands there. Mr. Cho presses the button. 

“I take it the lobby is usually not quite so busy.”

“I don’t know.”

Floor 62 is another condo, clearly used for socializing. It’s wide and has a balcony with a clear drop to a pool two and half floors below, currently covered with tarp. Harry can just sniff the chlorine. There’s a billiards table not being used, unobtrusive plants, a lot of mezzanines, and of course wrap-around windows of the view of New York.

Bruce, Steve, and Coulson are present with Stark. 

Bruce trots up, arms extended. He stops before they touch, looking at Harry like he wants to help him and strangle him at once.

“Harry. You alright? What the hell?”

“Bruce, this is Min-Jun Cho, my barrister. Mr. Cho, this is Dr. Bruce Banner, my friend.”

Mr. Cho smiles. “It’s a pleasure to meet you, Dr. Banner.”

Bruce’s gaze slides between them. “Harry, why are you bringing me your barrister?”

“Just so you know my face,” Mr. Cho answers genteelly. He sets down his satchel. “Harry tells me you are all aware of his… unique mind.”

Stark, twirling a stylus, smiles snidely, “You’ve experience with unique minds?” 

“I’ve experience with Harry’s,” Mr. Cho says, inured to such challenges. “I’ve helped him protect it from predation.”

Harry wasn’t expecting Coulson to be present and adjusts his intention, introducing him to Mr. Cho rather pointedly. 

Without any sign of hesitation, Mr. Cho takes a business card and hands it directly to the agent. 

“Cho and Chang, Attorneys at Law,” Stark reads from over his shoulder. Steve likewise crowds in to see. 

“If you’re ever missing gaps of time you can’t account for,” Mr. Cho says, “I hope you’ll remember my number. You’ll have to leave a message but I check it regularly.”

Stark shows his teeth again. “Get a lot of cases like that do you?”

“I’m sure I _can’t_ say,” Mr. Cho smiles. “If you suspect Harry of foul play, do get in contact with my partner as I might have a conflict of interest.”

Harry hadn’t been expecting that, but it’s good, fair. 

“Harry, lad, I’d best be off.”

“Of course. I always appreciate your assistance, Mr. Cho.”

“Always, lad,” he replies, soft creases around his eyes. He turns to the room. “Gentlemen.” He gathers his satchel and is gone in the lift.

“Harry,” Bruce whispers, holding onto the card. “What?”

“What is this supposed to be protecting us from?” Stark asks. 

“People who can erase our memories I imagine,” Steve says. 

“This is _not_ Men in Black. Shut up, Agent,” he snaps at Coulson.

“Please. That’s too on the nose.” His tone is distracted and contemplative. “Will this help?” he asks Harry. 

“Not a lot,” he admits. 

“But you want us to be aware.” He continues to watch, pulling parts together from the minutiae of detail. In his bland, polite face, his eyes are magnetic. “This was for Barton. You aren’t concerned at all that he shot you,” he realizes.

Harry shifts. “It was just a flesh wound.”

“AA! No!” Stark shouts. “No, I can out pop your pop culture don’t even try me. You… _you_. This is _unscientific_.”

“Alright, Tony. Calm down,” Bruce huffs. “Go… engineer something.”

“You think I don’t hear your sass but I _do_. It is _loud_ and hurtful. I want everyone to know I am going down to my lab because I _want_ to. Because I need to think without the gremlin getting his gremlin bullshit all over my thought process. Not because Bruce told me to.”

“Ok, Tony.”

“Fuck you, Steven.”

“Are you really alright?” Bruce asks as Stark trounces off. 

“I am.”

Bruce inhales. He looks blitzed. “ _Twice_ a year?”

After a moment, Harry says, “It’s not bad. They just ask me questions. It’s fine when Mr. Cho is there.”

“And when he isn’t?”

Harry shrugs. “It’s not bad,” he repeats. 

SHIELD has so far treated him better than his own government does though.

“I need to ask,” Coulson says. “What you said considering SHIELD.”

“Nothing,” Harry says. He amends, “I think nothing. I don’t know what they ask. I’m not allowed toremember, so that’s why Mr. Cho is there.”

“Harry, that is terrifying,” Bruce says. 

“Not right,” Steve mumbles. 

“They ask the same thing every time. That’s the rule. That’s why I have Mr. Cho there to enforce it. I’m not allowed to know, but I’ve never had contact with SHIELD before so I can’t imagine them asking about it.”

“Alright,” Coulson says after a minute. Harry very much doubts that’s the end of it. Coulson will want more ammunition before he pokes for weakness. But it is a reprieve. He leaves the card in Bruce’s hand, having likely already memorized the info. “Thank you for this. I don’t imagine it was as easy as you’ve made it seem.”

It wasn’t. 

He doesn’t want any of them to get hurt because of him. But it’s probably inevitable.

No.

This isn’t the same as the floor where Loki held him, but he remembers being up there. He remembers telling Loki that nothing is inevitable. It’s just a series of choices. 

This is another one Harry’s made. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I have a head canon about why Cho Chang has two surnames. I haven't found a smooth way of adding it to the story but I imagine how she entered the auror program with Harry after the war. They resolved a lot of stuff during their training, both accelerated, but she also told him about how her parents met. It has nothing to do with this story. I imagine that both Cho and Chang studied law together in Beijing sometime in the 70s, both muggle. They met Ryan there, an Irish witch studying microbiology to apply it to herbology, and the three of them fell in love. The two men moved back with her to the UK. She legally married Chang but wanted her daughter to have both her fathers' names. Her full name is Cho Ryan Chang, all of which are surnames.
> 
> There. Completely random head canon to explain something I think JKR didn't even bother to think about. And because her last surface into the media pissed me off, Mr. Cho and Mrs. Ryan are now both trans in this head canon. 
> 
> Which again, has nothing to do with the plot of this story, but I'm here to have fun.


	19. Interlude - Virginia (Part 1)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey! I know I said I was going to take a small break to write a new chapter, but holy crap, I wrote it so fast. And I'm...actually... somehow... really happy with it??????? Anyway.
> 
> This is the end of part 1 (The Battle of Manhattan Arc) but I'm continuing a part 1.5 that will run up to 25 chapters total. I'm going to try to mark that in the chapter names. I will post chapter 20, the first of part 1.5, July 5th - to give us a bit of a break in between parts.
> 
> I hope you enjoy this unexpectedly quick update. 
> 
> (PS. Thanks to everyone who enjoyed my head canon in the last chapter note!)

Interlude

.:Virginia:.

Pepper tosses her handbag on the floor by the kitchen and collapses into a lounge chair. At times like this, she misses her dog. The entire point of buying this big house with its large yard was to have room for her growing Saint Bernard. She still likes the house but without the click of Mary’s paws on the hardwood, her gruff _boofs_ of compassion, the drooling, the hair, the mud — the silence and space is now draining. 

Tony is avoiding her. This is not surprising. 

She is letting him. That is more concerning. 

She closes her tired eyes. Breathes in… and exhales. 

She goes to make herself a martini and deliberately locks the cabinets after so she won’t drain the house for more. 

Lubricated, Pepper pads on her stockings to her bedroom and prepares for the precise routine of nail care. This is a ritual that means she’s home. Home is where she stores her nail polish, the UV curing light, the vinyls when she’s feeling really artsy. The smell of acetate soothes something wicked and brambly inside her. The smell of an engine probably does the same thing for Tony. 

She didn’t put down a peel base for this last polish and has to soak her nails in acetone. She oils her fingers, wets the cotton pads, and wraps the fingers of one hand in tin foil while she prepares a bath with the other. It’s one in the morning. She needs to be up by seven. She should sleep. She demands this time for herself instead. 

All week, Pepper has been putting out fires, adjusting scheduling, assuring clients and customers and media that SI has everything under control. She’s had a week to think about the invasion. About the fact that humans are not alone in the universe. They aren’t even top dog. But the information doesn’t stick. All she can think about, when she has space to breathe, is Tony flying up into that black hole. 

Her chest stutters and clenches. Tightening her jaw, Pepper stops the water faucet and glares down into the water. 

Tony is a _good_ man. She shouldn’t be mad at him for doing a _good_ thing. It would be horrible, unconscionable, if that nuke landed. She can’t fathom the result, the alternate reality where New York City no longer exists. 

Pepper has her bachelor’s degree in American art history. She has her master’s in business. She is not a politician, but art is political. It is fear and representation and heart. Business is money, is knowing how labor converts to profit. And she knows two sides of a very difficult coin. 

Sending a nuke to _Manhattan_ seems like the rashest decision she has ever seen. Pepper’s first question is always, who profits? Who wins? Who compromises? Her second question is always, who does this hurt? Murdering what is essentially the capital of American commerce, beyond being vile, is stupid. Especially, as Pepper knows, because JARVIS is the most intelligent program in the world and grants her full access to his faculties, no one actually bothered to call for the National Guard. 

Pepper looks at abstract art and sees a design. 

Whoever called down that nuke wasn’t aiming at Manhattan. They weren’t aiming at the invasion. 

They were aiming, she suspects, at Tony. At the Avengers.

She knows that sounds crazy. It’s paranoia. 

Tony’s suit of armor terrifies her. It’s bullet holes. It’s bullet holes in a man she loves. She looks at it and she can’t see the art. She sees her boss, her friend, her lover in a coffin. She sees her nails breaking on the lid of it. 

Pepper doesn’t fill the rest of the tub. She splashes around in it, angry and slightly demented. Assured in her privacy to be as ugly and insane as she wants. She gets clean more or less in a vicious scrub, her teeth bared the whole time, and she thinks about Tony. 

When he first hired her, it was her second job as a PA. Her first was with a plastics company. She didn’t like the management. Tony Stark’s PA is a position of incredible power and back-breaking responsibility. Pepper didn’t expect to get through the first screening, much less to an interview where the man in charge wandered in _one hour_ late. 

Pepper waited long enough for him to enter the room so she could stand up, smooth down her skirt, and tell him in no uncertain terms that her time was more valuable than this, that if he treated his future employees like this then she politely wants no position in his company. Mr. Stark hadn’t gotten one word out at the time, and she left. The next day, she gets a callback from another company who accepted her resume. Tony Stark is in the waiting room. His eyes meet hers, but she walks into her meeting. No one mentions the celebrity outside. Thirty minutes later, she leaves, feeling the results are positive but that Tony Stark somehow managed to bomb it for her. He stands when she enters the waiting room again.

“Can I have a moment of your time?” is the first thing Tony Stark ever says to her. His body language, humble and polite, is belied by the gleam in his eyes — determined, resolved, and excited. 

He hold up his phone which has a stopwatch running. “I waited an hour. So we’d be even.”

And he smiles. It’s boyish. She lets herself be begrudgingly charmed by the directness of his gaze. _She_ takes _him_ to a cafe, though he pays, and they talk. About the position. About his horrid habits. His awful time maintenance. Hyper-fixations. Forgetful memory when it involves any social interactions. And just how much he is willing to pay for someone to tell him what boundaries he’s not allowed to trample over. 

Pepper accepts for the money, because Tony pleaded for the person in the personal assistant, and because she knew this would be an engaging commitment that could further her career. Because she felt a need here that she could answer, professionally. How that slipped into affection and love is unclear. She’s never held affection for anyone in a position of authority over her. She’s fairly sure though that love didn’t start to grow until after he made her CEO of his SI, a position she was amazingly under-qualified for. 

She wasn’t grateful. She was overwhelmed. But she managed. She had more control than she ever had as Tony’s PA. Being CEO is actually mostly just letting people do their jobs, and it helped that Tony taught her to smell bullshit a mile away. The microcosms of the company run smoothly. It is communicating the needs of the workers to the board of directors that is pulling teeth, and she manages that too. Despite even her own expectations, she is _good_ at this. 

And Tony. God, Tony.

Clad only in a pair of briefs, Pepper towels her hair. She combs it out, dries it, still thinking. She applies all the products her overpaid celebrity dermatologist suggests, leaving on a mask as she makes her way to the vanity station. 

She started her nail care ritual during her grad degree. Because she missed art, and replicating Mary Abbott’s pieces on her nails was frustrating and exhilarating when she got it right. Being a woman CEO of such a large company, every centimeter of her is microscopically defined by the press. She doesn’t light up every nail with colorful abstract design. She does one. A compromise of personality in a bite-size portion that media seems to allow as digestible. 

Tonight, she does two. 

She does them red. 

The bold, simple strokes could be likened to Tony’s armor. It’s not. It’s the blood of biting her tongue. They look like snake bites on her hand, the pinkie and ring finger. The rest of her fingers get their boring manicures, curved french tips in long-lasting gel. 

Is she being dramatic, she wonders.

It’s _two_ nails. It’s two nails out of ten, the rest of which she lets the world bully her into making plain. How the fuck does that make her dramatic? 

She finished the martini a while ago and is nursing a beer. 

He tears her up, Tony does. He asks a lot, makes it difficult to deliver, and Pepper is proud that she always rises to the challenge. 

Professionally proud. 

_I can’t do that in my personal life._

That’s the crux of it, what her thoughts are circling around. She doesn’t _want_ to give up her relationship with him, but being an intimate partner is not _rising_ to a challenge. It’s not him setting a goal for her to follow. 

She loves him. The fact that she does brings frustrated tears to her face. She _hates_ that she’s crying about it. 

She wasn’t and isn’t an ambitious person. She doesn’t want spotlight. Everything she’s ever achieved has been to make _herself_ proud above all else. 

She thinks of Tony and the life he’s making, the life he wants, and she feels thin. He doesn’t like the press and the fame anymore than she does, but his bastard of a father made sure he was prepared for it. Gilded his life in chrome, shoved him in front of flashbulbs, and made him addicted to praise in place of love. 

Pepper wishes to God she could look at him in that Iron Man suit and praise him rather than screaming at him to get out. 

_Why is it my responsibility to make him happy?_

_That’s a relationship, you dolt_ , an uncharitable part of herself chides. 

But, Pepper realizes, she doesn’t want to _make_ him happy. She wants him to _be_ happy. She wants to watch him cavort in that amazing lab. She wants to see him revolutionize the world. She wants to see him be cunning and petty and dickish and _good_. It’s just she can’t watch him be threat enough to have people send bombs after him. She can’t have that in her personal life. She can’t welcome that silence into her home again. 

_Can’t you? Don’t you love him enough?_

Enough to be unhappy? Pepper has always wanted someone in her life, a partnership where they support one another. As CEO and as owner of SI, she felt they were equally involved in a similar industry. What is she to Iron Man? Another civilian to watch his suicidal act of martyrdom?

If — she braces herself for the thought — if they break up, will her thoughts change? Will she be able to watch him go into danger, be the type of hero the cops may have to shoot at, as his business partner, rather than his lover? Will that make it easier?

She doesn’t know. Make it easier? No. But maybe, if she weren’t his lover, it would be less lonely. 

Her nails gleam back at her. Fresh blood. Blood she hasn’t torn out of him yet. 

Her thoughts circle round and round and round. She’s exhausted on the bed. Not even tipsy. But waterlogged with fatigue. Logic and emotion wrestle. She’s an artist. She doesn’t dismiss her heart. But she reaches far into the future and she thinks, _He’s going to widow me_. With startling clarity. 

_Cut my losses? Before I’m in too deep._

_I’ll never stop loving you._

_You’ll never come back to me. You want me to reach for you instead._

That’s it, she realizes. Like she doesn’t know that Tony has a mock-up of a suit with a bit more curve than his usually one. JARVIS gives her full access. 

He needs someone that reaches for his insane levels of recklessness, and _I don’t want to_. 

Fuck.

She finishes the beer. 

Without her future and her heart on the line, she can see so clear how she can protect him. 

From the ground. From contacts at mixers and threats poised as pretty whispers and contracts that give them leverage, that involve him in the superstructure of their society, that tangles SI in the fortunes of the very people who feel threatened by him. 

If Tony poses a challenge, a professional one, she’ll do what she always does and rise to meet it and be better for it. This time though, she needs to bleed them both to do so.

** End of Part 1 **


	20. Catching His Bearings (part 1.5)

**Part 1.5**

**Beneath Brooklyn, 2012 June**

Harry returns a book to the gollum at the circulation desk. Its round spectacles reflect the light. At the top of its smooth face, Yiddish is etched in the baked clay. Cracks glisten with dried resin giving it honey-colored wrinkles. It gently handles the tome with nailless hands, searching for damage. The crinkle of vellum and of wicker is the only sound it gives. Satisfied, it sets the tome reverently on the stack, folds its brown hands, and gives Harry a smile. He can tell because, even without a mouth, its glasses tilt up.

Hushed inside the library, Harry asks, “Are more of the Nordic scripts I ordered in?”

The gollum raises its long finger slowly to ask him to wait and shuffles, spine bent, behinds the shelves. 

To busy himself, Harry looks around. The bedrock beneath Brooklyn has been sanded smooth. Occasionally Harry will see the fossilized remains of an old fish flit through the gneiss and schist, a shadow of bone among the vast folded layers. Palm-sized glassy moths amble, shedding bright light, as they swarm towards the salt trails. The library’s custodians keep the salt mounds inside floating lanterns, orbiting the room so the light spreads even through the tunnels. The moths, translucent and electric, are in the last cycle of their life, shedding light to attract mates. Once they lose the last of their energy, they will lay eggs, unafraid of predators, and die. The eggs and carcasses both will be collected and spirited away to continue the cycle. 

The entire cave, fastidiously dry to protect the books, has a susurrus. Whispers bounce oddly in the space or get swallowed whole. The depth itself hold a sacredness. The tunnels, carefully swept of their small millipedes, don’t hold the same ghastly aesthetics as Roman catacombs. Rather than cataclysmic judgement, skeletons nameless in their multitudes, the Yosef Memorial Library feels safe. Like a tidy mouse going to ground where the cat can’t reach. 

The gollum ambles back with a calfskin bound book. It sets it on a desk, allowing Harry to come forward. The text protests opening, the spine water-damaged, but it obeys the gollum. Old Norse spills in foxed brown. Harry preemptively pulls his dictionary and starts to skim. The gollum holds it patiently. 

The special archives are nearly entirely silent except for a few other white-haired scholars — two Rabbis and an old maned werewolf with yellow claws carefully examining newsprint. 

The gollum turns the pages for him. These old records are originally from Cluny, spared before the Huguenots sacked the abbey. They’d been in a private collection before they’d found their way to Yosef. Most the materials in the library in fact he understands were saved in some way, many from the book burnings of Europe. Harry’s not sure whether or not the relief of the woman in the foyer is a witch (he’s unsure whether or not Jewish magicians prefer that term). Even to other magicians, Judaic magicks are secret, restricted to the most dedicated and closely bound in ethics. But Veira Sofer is recognized as the library’s architect, the foretelling words beneath her frame, _Dort wo man Bücher verbrennt, verbrennt man auch am Ende Menschen_. 

_Where books are burned, in the end, people will also be burned._

These records have been doubly spared throughout the centuries. Accounts from the witches at the Battle of Tønsberg. 

A month since the invasion, they’ve tipped into summer. Harry’s kept himself busy frustrating SHIELD by vanishing to study Aesir-Terran relations.

The Avengers, what he sees of them, seem preoccupied with finding a way to return Loki and Thor to Asgard. Researching the Chitauri has been shuttled aside. 

From what Harry understands, Thor got caught on the Terran end of the Bifrost when it collapsed a year ago. SHIELD assisted in providing him an identity, Dr. Donald Blake, to help a Dr. Foster recreate the transport. With the Tesseract (which SHIELD has had since 2009 but it was classified), they are more confident that intergalactic travel is possible. 

Harry has taken it upon himself to do his own research. European magical communities have their own history with the Aes and the giants of Jötunheimr. 

Before the Battle of Tønsburg in Norway in 965, the bleed-over between the Spheres, a colloquial term for dimensions that eclipse one another, was less diluted. The witches of that region, called völva, were liaisons between the denizens of these different worlds. An leader of ice Jötnar had become of a conquering mind, and the Humans, in turn, became a, what Harry would like to call, come-fucking-try-me state of mind. Jötnar, the very lifeblood of primordial creation — of constant volcanism, the very production of water on the earth’s pillowy crust, of the storms that raged when the planet cooled — are not beings easily persuaded to negotiation. These Jötnar were two or three generations from the type of nightmarish beings born along the basalt of the ocean’s formation. Smaller, of greater sentience, but children of planetary sunder — ice Jötnar even conceivably being the youngest and therefore the most clever. Humans on the other hand have had hundreds of generations to learn how to be cunning in their survival. 

In Tønsburg 965, the ice Jötnar chief sat down to truce with the Humans. Hilinn, the author of the Cluny document, says their camp was ambushed by Aes. Chaos erupted. A third party had never interposed itself so boldly, without invitation, into the politics of two planes’ politics. In a way, to the people involved, it seemed to defy nature. A berserker madness was released on all sides. The battle — not a war, not a series of skirmishes, but one single battle — lasted for the turning of five moons, time rendered meaningless as magic, gods, and raw elementals tore apart anything moving. 

Hilinn survived, with two other sisters. Enraged by Odin’s trespass, they used the last of their energies to move the Spheres out of eclipse with Jötunheimr and Asgard, flushing the borders closed. Like the snick of a door closing. Or a shadow. The sun bleeding it thin and then into oblivion. 

The power of mages was much different back then. 

Another source, written by a Persian scholar, postulates that what the three völva did, in effect, reverberated through the rest of the planet, beginning in a decline of celestial happenings worldwide. There is a plethora of sources critiquing that hypothesis. Harry’s not enough of a historian to lend his opinion one way or the other.

But it is a fact that whole scale invasions between Spheres no longer occurred after the völva moved it. 

Barring last month. 

Asgard’s Bifröst was still capable of forming a bridge, but it is limited in some form or another, the mechanics escaping Harry. There are ways of bypassing Asgard and Jötunheimr as well, though over the centuries those ways too began to diminish. For different reasons not really interconnected. Grudges. Vows. Bureaucracy. Astrophysics. Time corrodes everything. 

When he finishes the reading, absorbing what he needs, Harry lets the gollum tidy the tome. Not for the first time, he laments that magicians would rather agonize for the fifty thousandth time over what the Goblin Wars were about than translate or even transcribe primary sources. 

Harry rides the lift back up through the hotel that had been built on top of the library. He takes the metro back towards Stark’s mansion. Though he’s seen signs of Bruce cohabiting the loo, he hasn’t seen the man himself in nearly a week. Busy. 

There is evidence of multiple people picking through the meals Harry’s prepared and stored in the fridge. Harry’s managed to catch a few of them going in and out. Steve. Barton. Occasionally Romanov. Since Harry noticed, he has started leaving notes, asking for their tastes — since he’s not doing much anything else this month but catch his bearings, finding the library, reading and trying to stay out people’s way. Since last week, they begun to leave notes back. 

Steve, with increasing detail, leaves landscapes of the city, or silly pigeons, in ballpoint ink. An interesting payment. Barton has since started doodling cartoonish dogs on his requests for ridiculously elaborate sweets. Romanov writes her notes in block letters like statements of fact along with, of all things, stickers of Mickey Mouse telling him things like “GREAT!” “FANTASTIC!” and “NICE TRY.”

Because of this, Harry is not startled to find someone in the kitchen. He is somewhat surprised to see that it is Thor. 

“Harry, Son of Hart! Well met, my friend!” Thor doesn’t boom, but he does carry volume that hits well before him.

“Hello, Prince Thor.”

“We need not stand on ceremony. My title is supercilious on Midgard.”

Harry tries to picks at Thor’s use of the word supercilious, not sure how the All-Speak managed to translate into that. 

“Er. Yes. Just Harry then. My name I mean.”

Thor’s smile both broadens and softens. 

“Have you eaten?” Thor asks.

“Not yet.”

“I have grown fond of Midgardian food. Such diversity and… spice. Everything is so sweet.”

Does Thor think sugar is a spice? 

“Is Asgard’s food different?” Harry asks politely. 

He nods. “Very much. May I take you to lunch?” he asks, clearly having practiced with this phrase. “There is a matter I wish to speak with you about. And a favor I wish to ask.”

Harry lets Thor lead him back out into the city.

They walk. Amicably. Thor doesn’t bother to fill in the silence with conversation. He seems content to look around, memorizing the alien architecture, interested in everything without requiring an explanation for it. 

Thor picks a Mediterranean place. It’s ritzy. Harry, with access to time to groom himself and clean his clothes, no longer looks like an abandoned muppet, but he’s a little too plainly dressed for the clientele. Thor, in comparison, is wearing designer sportswear, personal-trainer fit, with his long golden hair caught in a tail and his smile easy. Like he’s too rich to care about dressing appropriately.

“You did remember to bring money?” Harry asks. 

“Yes,” Thor exclaims, perusing the menu. “Very vulgar means of economy, but I understand it is necessary for your system to function.”

Is Thor socialist?

“What is tahini?” Thor asks.

Harry gets him settled with a dish, realizes he probably eats the same amount a sumo wrestler would, and orders five more, deciding to just pick off of whatever Thor has. 

Thor is a grubby eater, liberal use of fingers. Even after a year on Earth, he is not inclined to use silverware when a mop of bread will do. He is also enthusiastic about enjoying every overlarge bite. They earn a fair share of glances. Thor is nearly demolishing the chair out of pure muscle mass, so no one says anything or asks him to be quiet. 

Thor’s eyes go wide with delight when Harry asks the server for coffee after the plates are cleared. 

“So,” Harry says. “You wanted to ask a favor?”

A cloud passes over his features. He drinks wine without tasting the boutique. Like it’s water. Harry can already guess the subject matter before he speaks. “Yes. My Lady Jane tells me that the eve of our return to Asgard approaches. I am eager to be home, but I must admit. I am not eager to deliver my brother or the tales of his folly to our father.” 

Thor pauses as he works through his words.

“I also think that Director Fury believes my brother may have been acting under another’s will.”

Harry blinks. Thor misreads his surprise.

“That does not excuse his actions. I do not believe my brother weak enough to-”

“Thor,” Harry stops him. “Being overpowered by someone else… Circumstances do not always permit people to be the strongest person in the room.”

Thor’s brow wrinkles.

“The Director thinks he was controlled,” Harry prompts. 

“I believe so. He is delaying our return, trying to force some information out of my brother.”

“You’ve gone along with it because you don’t want to drag your brother in front of your father.”

He nods, troubled.

“What’s changed?” Harry asks.

“I fear… the Director may begin using other means to coerce an answer out of my brother. I…” He holds his fingers loose around the glass. “Understand the urgency. But I cannot allow my brother to be harmed in such a way.”

Harry takes a sip of the dark, thick brew. “It is a matter of honor?”

Thor looks affronted. “He is my brother! I cannot- I would not-”

The air spices with ozone and static cling. 

“Do you know what we call Loki’s Wager?” Harry asks. 

Mulishly, Thor shakes his head.

“It’s a story. The Loki of legend made a wager with a group of dwarves. He offered for his bet, if he loses, to let the dwarves have his head. The dwarves forged what they promised to forge and asked for their reward.”

“But he did not specify his neck,” Thor says. He has at least heard the story. 

“They could not take his neck,” Harry agrees. “They sewed his lips shut instead. Thematically, Loki’s Wager is meant to show how definitions become meaningless once you examine them too closely. But that’s a story. If it’s real,” Harry says. “In the tale, Loki is not Odin’s son, but a sworn-brother. Perhaps it is easier to let one’s brother’s lips be sewn shut.”

“Mind your tongue,” Thor growls.

“Yes, Prince Thor. Forgive my impetuosity.”

Thor grits his teeth. Static jumps around their table. 

Harry lets the anger sit and stew. Gradually, rather than fermenting, it passes over Thor. His muscles unclench and the ozone dissipates.

“I understood the fairness of it. My father’s will is law.”

“Why do you want to help Loki now?”

“Because he _is_ my brother. Because… perhaps… I failed him.”

Harry’s not sure how brothers work. He’s watched the Weasleys but there always seems to be this strange line he could never quite fathom between teasing and caring. Where loyalty does and doesn’t play. It seems nonsensical. 

“How can _I_ help?” Harry asks. 

Thor inhales and straightens. 

“It is unbecoming to ask. But I would like for you to speak with my brother.”

“Me?”

“He says nothing of import, but he has spoken of you. I believe he will speak with you, if no one else.”

But _why?_

“People believe I might be involved with him you know.”

“You were not,” Thor says. Just like that. 

Harry frowns at him. A prince should be better at politics. He should certainly be more considerate.

“What is true is not what matters here,” Harry says. “I am not the son of a king. If they think I am a traitor, that puts me in danger.”

“I will protect-”

“From Asgard?”

Thor draws back.

He’s so unexpectedly young.

“I don’t want your protection,” Harry says. “I want you to understand what position you are putting me in. Do you?”

“No,” Thor says. It pains him, but he is honest. “Yet I would still ask you.”

Harry considers. Loki is dangerous. More so than SHIELD? Harry can’t yet say. But he also knows more about the invasion and the dynamics behind it than he is letting on. Can Harry really ignore that? It’s not his responsibility. Sturnway was quite clear on that. 

“This is not about honor,” Harry says. “This is about your relationship with your brother. So, in return, I’ll have a favor from you, not as Prince of Asgard, but Thor Son of Odin. Fair?”

“It is fair.”

Harry wouldn’t trust a muggle or even a magician to keep to a deal like this. But he will Thor. 

“When?” Harry asks as they stand from the table.

“As soon as possible. Let us to DC?”

Well, it’s not like Harry had plans anyway. 


	21. Entering the Lion's Den, but who's the lion? (Part 1.5)

The Triskelion is a very pretty building full of offices. 

The building they go to looks like a power plant. It’s drab and grey and buttresses the water like a dead seal. 

They are led underground, through a series of tunnels, some with exposed rock bed. 

The shaft widens to a hangar and splits off — spider-like — to other tunnels and windowed observatories. Unlike Yosef Memorial, it is snaked with electrical torches and more close-quartered, with tracks. 

Coulson has managed to get a hold of Harry and Thor, but it’s Rogers passing by, apparently just finished with the gym, that wins stunned blinking and some backtracking to catch up with them.

“Hey.”

“Hey,” Harry returns. 

With a sheepish look, Rogers fiddles with the towel slung over his shoulder, though he doesn’t look sweaty enough to need it. 

“I didn’t expect to see you here.”

“Thor wants me to talk to Loki.”

Rogers looks alarmed. “Why?”

Harry shrugs. Not bothering to grab a uniform, Steve keeps pace with them and chats about nothing with Thor.

Coulson takes them to a monitor room/workshop.

Stark is there, in a less newsworthy suit, leaning into an array. He doesn’t look much different from the last time Harry saw him a month ago. 

His face is clouded with thought, worry lines and shadows, body pulled chest first towards the display, hips canted outwards. Then he catches sight of them.

The supine line sharpens. The worry and intensity fade into a debonair smirk. The transition is too seamless to be anything but intentionally misleading. 

“Well look what the cheap suits dragged in? Hey Captain Underpants, Point Break, Castaway, assorted people who don’t matter. If you wanted to see the science, you’re too late.”

“Harry?” a voice calls.

“...Bruce?”

“I thought you were in New York,” Bruce says.

“I thought you were in New York,” Harry says back.

Bruce never mentioned. It’s not like they keep tabs on each other, but still, he thought Bruce would have said something about working at the capitol of the place that wants to dissect him like a lab rat. 

“Uh, well… All the parts are here,” Bruce says, awkward. 

Before Harry can respond, a woman in a lab coat makes a bee line for him. 

“You must be Harry Hartson. I’m Doctor Foster.” She doesn’t try to shake his hand but only because it doesn’t seem to occur to her. “Sorry.” For what? “Thor’s told me about you. Well, he says you’re a brave, true friend,” she says with a grimace. “I heard you fought in the battle, and you’re going to talk to Loki. I told him you might not want to. But I guess you are. I know it’s important to Thor, but we’re all but ready to send them back. I don’t want anyone to ruin it.” 

The implication being that Harry would ruin it. Which is rich, since Thor thinks Fury’s the one manufacturing delays.

“I will… try not to,” Harry says. 

Loki on the monitors on the screen is this time bound, and for some reason, Thor’s hammer is on his lap. Stripped down to his underthings, Harry can see the sweat glistening on his skin with a Stygian shimmer. He looks oddly seasick. Different than before. The liquid adheres to his ivory chemise, his hair limp and heavy with damp. Barefoot, undressed, and trussed to a steel chair, it seems fairly miserable. Every so often, he rolls his shoulders, rotates his pelvis, and clenches his thighs to relieve the pain of sitting in one position for so long. The muzzle and shock collar are dark and heavy on his face. 

Harry comprehends more of Thor’s quiet desperation. 

“Those bonds are made of graphene,” Stark says. “Even Thor would have a time breaking them. We tested it.”

“The collar sends a shock when the muzzle detects speech movements,” Foster continues. “Magic is only science we haven’t discovered yet, but we thought it safe to cover our bases.”

“This is inhumane,” Rogers says. 

“Hey,” Stark says. “We aren’t exactly equipped to deal with him here. We’re just trying to keep him secure until Point Break can take him home.”

Several agents brief Harry on the new cage and the protocols before allowing him inside. 

The air outside the cage is cool. There is a cheap folding chair set two meters from the enclosure.

Loki watches him with eyes harangued with heat and fever. A harness of those graphene coils and magnets are more visible up close, securing his arms to the rim of the seat, his feet planted. The collar is latched to the single strut at the back of the seat and flips to green as Harry observes, measuring the weight of composed spite in Loki’s eyes. 

“Oh, at last,” he says. The intercoms clicks, chopping a millisecond off the top word. His voice is muffled by the muzzle but undeniably posh. “I thought I was leaving without saying goodbye.”

“May I sit?” Harry asks. 

He nods at the chair solicitously. “Go ahead.”

Harry takes the seat, leaving his back to the door.

“You look like shite,” Harry says. 

Loki’s hum is dry. It scrapes like razor grass. 

“Yes, I’ve let myself go a little. You look…” He tilts his head, menacing as a raven. “Thin. Has the green beast been feeding you? Or your knight in shining armor? How the Good fail you.”

“Your concern for my health is touching,” Harry says. 

“You’ve been slaved before haven’t you?”

It hits Harry. The scimitar shape of his words. But it impacts like a chop at the sternum.

“I saw your back,” Loki says while Harry absorbs the blow. His head is canted so he can look at Harry through his lashes, all vicious bruise. “I could not remember where I recalled such a mark. But I’ve had a lot of time to think.” He purrs, “The Tuatha de Danann.”

It has been a long time since Harry has heard anyone refer to their old name. Loki doesn’t pronounce it like a tumble of wind through reeds but with the gravity of ice. A Germanic accent. Not like a dwindling star but an iron mace. 

“The Tuatha de Danann died out generations ago,” Harry says. “They are called the Sidhe now.”

Loki stares at him, sheathed in blankness. The silence stretches. 

Somewhere in the monitor room, someone is doing a google search. 

“They marked you,” Loki says.

The ink doesn’t feel. Usually. When it does, it is mostly a stretch and hits the bloodstream like caffeine. Or like a good dose of vitamin D after endless time underground. 

“I noticed as well,” Loki continues, wreathed in chains and somehow holding a leash. “Your spine’s been modified. Cushioning between the discs.” His teeth hiss. “I scanned you while you were indisposed.”

“You mean shot?” Harry asks him.

Loki ignores him. “I thought at first, you’d been changed for combat. You seem to be very handy with blades. But your eyes are human. Your flesh thin. No claws, no sharpened fangs. The tribes, they only keep Humans to hunt them, to eat, or to serve them.”

“Hmm. And,” Harry corrects quietly. Not or.” Harry explains, “To hunt, to eat, and to serve them.”

“You don’t seem nibbled on.”

“Depends on what they eat.” He considers Loki. “Go on.”

Loki’s brow rises. “ _Go on?_ ” he repeats, curling the words. 

“Finish your thought. You noticed my spine’s been changed. Tell me why.”

“To make you more flexible,” Loki acquiesces. 

“What does the mark do?”

“Absorb magic. It’s how you interrupted my shifting.”

“Did that bother you?” Harry asks, watching his eyes. They give away more than the rest of him. He noticed in the Tower too. “A lowly Human. Interrupting your magic. Come. Degrade me,” Harry says. “Tell me what you think they did to me.” 

Loki doesn’t.

“How did you do it?” he asks instead. 

“Do what?”

“Survive. Escape.” He shifts in the bonds. “They don’t let things go. The mark, the modifications. They meant to keep you. They wouldn’t have let you go.” 

Harry is quiet. Of all the things he’d thought Loki would jabber about, it wasn’t this. His time with the Sidhe is not buried. Those memories are incapable of being buried or hidden away. They would have bled him dry. He had to smooth them, turning the jagged shards of them over and over in his bloody mouth until he began to wear down the ends. He can look at them now, think of them, without recalling _what actually happened_. 

So he’s not beaten by the mere mention of them. Taken aback but not thrown off his guard. 

And honestly, knowing the ears listening in, using the Sidhe might obfuscate magical politics on Terra. Might allay the suspicions around him and his “uniqueness.” If he’d were willing to use the memories for some sleight of hand. 

Returning Loki’s gaze, Harry says, “Quid pro quo?”

Loki’s brow rucks in confusion. Harry simplifies.

“I’ll show you mine if you show me yours.”

“An information exchange?” Loki leans forward, eyes wide. “By the roots of the Yggdrasil, I wish I had gotten that mind under the scepter.”

His face spasms. He looks gruffly puzzled for all of two seconds before he realizes that the collar has shocked him. Sinking back into the chair, he starts to laugh. 

That’s no good, Harry thinks. 

After a moment’s consideration, Harry motions to the camera. “Water please.”

They wait until the vault door opens. Steve of all people appears, squeezing through the thick door with a crinkly water bottle. Rather than approaching, Steve gestures with it, calling Harry over by the wall. 

Excusing himself, Harry joins the soldier. He’s dwarfed by him as Steve closes in to make their conversation more private. 

“Don’t,” Rogers says, so curt as to be indecipherable. 

“What?” Harry over-pronounces it in the flat American way. 

“This is…” Steve’s gaze flickers to him, away, and back. “This is dangerous for you.”

“You don’t want answers?”

Steve grits his teeth. “This is… It’s _not right_.”

Harry places his hand over the water bottle Steve is attempting to crunch to death. It stills him. It surprises Harry how easily his hand still him.

“I know what I’m doing. Somewhat.”

“Somewhat,” Steve chuckles bitter, before the strain returns to his features. He bites his lip before ducking his head. He says, “No one’s entitled to your hurt. It’s not _payment_.”

Damn, Harry thinks. The way he loves Bruce, the way he loves Ginny and Cyril and Iskra and many many more, he didn’t think he’d add a soldier to that hoard. 

This is the most compassionate thing he’s ever heard anyone say. It touches him where he’d thought he’d been inured to silly, beautiful statements like Steve’s.

Steve shuffles awkwardly under his stare before Harry remembers to lower his gaze. 

With due diligence, Harry takes the water. 

“I’m at my best when I’m being used,” he tells him.

Steve whines, catching both the innuendo and the truth of it. He pinks (poor Irish boy), but he looks desperately unhappy. 

“Will you do something for me?” Harry asks, making a decision.

“Of course,” Steve says. The dope. 

“Take Bruce out of the monitor room.”

His hands flinch and open like they need something to grab. Or punch. “Are you… sure?”

“Very.”

Steve doesn’t look convinced, but he slides through that huge, heavy door again. Harry turns back to the outside of the cage.

“Problem?” Loki drawls.

“Nah,” Harry says.

He glances right, at the complicated gate-like, slidey-door feature at the entrance of the cell. The poly-glass is impenetrably thick, fused shut except for a slot-vent in the ceiling and this “door” that looks like a particularly demented vending machine. 

He knocks on the surface, is awarded a plasticky sound, and looks in the closest camera. 

Even through the lens, he hears a resounding _No, don’t even think about it_. 

Harry stares solemnly back, unwilling to consider continuing the negotiation without watching Loki’s reactions closer.

The moment stretches, a handful of minutes turning into a dozen. He is contemplating ruining the machines, more to make a point than for efficiency, when a dry whir heralds the turn of the cage’s latch. It opens like a pretty plastic maw.

Harry steps in. He waits for the wall to shut behind him and the one in front to open.

He’s greeted by a wall of heat and a smell like ice thaw. 

Up close, Loki looks even more terrible. The translucency of his skin exposes an underbelly of grey. The beds of his toenails are cracked, and his skin is slick like spoiled meat. 

It still smells like spring. 

The last time they were so close, Loki dropped Harry eighty stories. 

Harry offers the bottle to Loki. 

Loki doesn’t move. “Oh, are you being kind?”

“No. I’m making a point.”

“That you have all the power?” 

“That would just be redundant.”

Loki considers. 

Harry detects a sliver of acceptance in the cant of his chin. 

Placing the bottle in the crux between Loki’s arm and hip, Harry leans in. The muzzle is touch-sensitive, with restraining glyphs in a galdrastafur. Even in such a state, Loki could probably do a lot of damage with words alone. 

“Speak no evil,” Harry says with his hand on the clasp. 

He glances down the line of his hip to look in Loki’s gimlet eye. 

“No evil,” Loki agrees. 

“You sure?”

“Yes.”

“Positive?”

He hears a caw that may have been a laugh. 

“Yes,” he repeats.. 

Harry removes the muzzle with the same intuitiveness he used to fly a Chitauri chariot. It feels like both leather and metal as his fingers track the grain. The runes are like a map of circuitry, fanning across the sides. 

Newly freed, Loki looks like he might be considering biting him. Harry waits it out until Loki flicks his hair back. 

Harry picks up the bottle. He takes a small sip himself, just in case it’s been tampered with, before helping Loki drink it. 

There is an intimacy in feeling Loki’s throat move. In the indignity of need that Harry politely tries to shield from the cameras. For a moment, pure relief is the only thing on Loki’s face. 

Harry eases the water back, keeping a guiding but restraining hand under Loki’s jaw until he disconnects his lips. 

Not a drop is spilled.

Granting him the illusion of privacy, Harry caps the lid and folds down to the floor, placing the half-empty bottle beside him.

When Harry looks back up, Loki looks thoughtful. 

“What point was that to make?” Loki asks. He can’t quite manage to hide how wrecked he is, a softness intruding on the snideness as he looks down. 

“That I don’t need to be protected from you.”

Loki laughs again roughly and bitterly. “The declawed beast.”

“Your power isn’t in your hand. It’s in your mouth,” Harry tells him. He folds the muzzle and sets it aside. “I don’t need to be protected from that either.”

“What a curious thing you are,” Loki drawls. 

“All the better to eat you with, my dear.”

He doesn’t think Loki will get the reference but he laughs. It’s rough but unexpectedly silver. “Did the Sidhe teach you word games?”

“It’s a past-time I’ve learned to appreciate. Did the All-Father teach you to lie?”

If the abrupt reference to his father unsettles him, he covers it quick. “He taught me politics.”

Harry grunts. “Which he neglected with Thor.”

Loki’s gaze goes crafty. “He was more concerned with Thor’s ability to wield power. He thought politics beneath him.”

“Something for his wife to learn I suppose.”

“ _I_ was meant to help him,” Loki corrects him, somewhat factiously. “His _shadow_. Thor never had to worry about economics, about diplomacy. He never had to _think_.”

“But you did. You found a way to bring the ice lands of Jötunheimr to its knees. End a centuries-long protracted war that had no purpose but to make Thor glorious.” 

“ _Yes_ ,” Loki hisses, starved. “But Odin-” His words snag.

“But Odin rejected you. Worse. He lied. You weren’t Thor’s shadow. You were his scapegoat. You were the one everyone was allowed to hate so Thor could be loved.”

Loki looks pissed and damaged. Like Harry has peeled back his skin and poked. 

“What did you try to do?” Harry asks. “Try to prove that Thor was unworthy? Try to solve the problem _he_ couldn’t? Only, no. No, you were never, ever meant to. Odin _took_ you because Aesir are supposed to be the ruling race.”

“He didn’t _take_ me! I was abandoned!”

“Who told you that?” Harry asks.

Loki looks down at him, stricken. After a moment, he shakes his head. “Enough. _Enough_. You’ve told me nothing.”

“You’ve told me nothing,” Harry counters. “We’ve each asked a question. We’ve each answered. I extrapolated the rest.”

Loki glares. “The _Sidhe_ taught you this.”

Harry doesn’t reply. 

“How,” Loki asks, “did the Sidhe find you?”

Harry takes a slow, deep breath and lets it out. “I was looking for a girl.”


	22. Quid Pro Quo (Part 1.5)

“Three types of children make it into the realm of the Sidhe,” Harry explains on the floor of the cell. “Foundlings, Changelings, and Stumbles. The ones who Stumble slip between the world and have an adventure. Sometimes get eaten. But if they survive, they snap back to our world like they never left. Changelings are exchanged for hexes or unwanted fae shortly after birth. They’ve been outlawed for about three centuries. Foundlings are taken. They consent to be taken, maybe hoping for adventure or promised a family who doesn’t hurt them. Regardless, a Sidhe will appear, seduce them, and ferry them to one of the Hills where they hope to live happily ever after. If they are very lucky, the Sidhe will forget about them and they can do as they like. Rarely, they return to us, having bargained or hunted their way back.

“I was looking for a girl,” Harry says. 

“Did you Stumble?”

“No, of course not. I was Found. What happened?” Harry asks. “After the Bifröst?”

Loki gives him a carrion glare. “I was picked up by scavengers, sold to a creature interested in my genetics. They’d never seen a creature like me.”

“A Collector?”

“You _are_ well informed,” Loki hums. “No. A physician.”

Considering the context, Harry imagines it was not an ethical one. Loki was an experiment, a specimen of biological curiosity. Or perhaps something more insidious. 

“Did you find the girl?” Loki asks. 

“No,” Harry says. 

Loki studies him. He rakes his gaze all over Harry’s face, his insides, searching. 

“She wasn’t real,” Loki says.

“She wasn’t real,” Harry agrees quietly. 

“Your own kind betrayed you.”

“Some did.”

His eyes narrow. “Why?”

“I didn’t ask,” Harry says. He hadn’t needed to. 

He had had a near cult-like following, was marrying into one of the most powerful Light families in the country, and was completing the auror program on the advance track, hunting Death Eaters well beyond what should have been capable (or responsible for) considering his age and power skill. Rumors of his mastery of the Elder Wand seeded fear and awe and he was beloved as no single warrior had been in Britain since Cú Chulainn. 

The decision to give him to the fae must have been one made behind closed doors, on whispers that trickled down from the top of the MoM, unchecked by his immediate superiors. A cold-blooded, desperate decision. Let the fae break him. Then he’ll give us the Elder Wand. 

Harry is, and always will be, tinder for wildfire, politically speaking. Children of prophecy generally are. 

“If they did not profit from selling you, then I imagine it was because of fear,” Loki says.

“What of your physician?” Harry asks, trying to parse how the creature connects with the Chitauri. “Did he seek profit in you?”

Loki snorts, pleased to have a nugget of information Harry can’t see. “The creature’s objective was not greed. It was devotion.”

A shadow passes over Loki’s face. His mouth, freed from the restraint, presses thin. 

Harry looks to the side, considering. 

“You don’t mean devotion to his work,” Harry guesses. 

Religion is not something Harry understands. Faith and belief are things he’d never felt for anything other than people. Ron, Hermione, Dumbledore. Hagrid. Luna. Minerva. Even Bruce in certain regards. He doesn’t know how people can trust in something so abstract.

There is something large, something Loki is avoiding. For petty reasons or scheming ones. 

“Who are you protecting?”

“I am not _protecting!_ ” Loki snarls. 

“Then tell me about the physician’s devotion. Who was he devoted to?” 

Loki glares at him, spiteful. Harry pushes. 

“Someone powerful. Someone even you are scared of.”

“I am not scared!” Loki protests again before sighing so hard his head sags from the slump of his shoulders. “You cannot defeat him. I am not certain all of Asgard could defeat him.”

The magnitude of the statement means something that Harry cannot ignore. Loki is the only one here who has seen the enemy, knows the scope of his power and army, and why he is coming at all, what he wants, the dimensions of defeat. 

“Interesting.”

Loki blinks. He lifts his head and stares at Harry, confused and irritated. 

“Interesting?”

“He’s coming,” Harry gathers. “Regardless of what we do. Of course I’d rather no else be in danger, but it becomes a puzzle, doesn’t it? How to hunt him?”

“Hunt _him_?” Loki blusters, looking at Harry like he’s insane. 

“There was no girl,” Harry says. Loki blinks, trying follow the track of the conversation while tired and sick. “I had consented to be bound. Until the girl — her whereabouts or her demise — could be found. Without the girl, the limits of my servitude became… endless. I was trapped until my master grew bored with me. How did I survive?”

“You did not let them become bored with you.”

“How did you survive your physician?”

Loki smirks. “I gave myself a use.”

It’s quiet. Both of them tasting the somewhat similar circumstances of their thralldom. 

“What did you sacrifice?” Loki asks. “To escape.”

“Me,” Harry says. “Really. One man goes in. Another comes out.”

“That is true of almost anything. Even among gods.”

Harry looks up at him. Meets his eyes. 

Loki’s gaze softens with understanding. Softens the way the ground goes when you step right through leaves into a hole. 

“You,” Loki says, somewhat wondering, “were something like Thor weren’t you? Golden.”

Harry’s lips twitch. 

“They hollowed you out,” Loki says. His eyes narrow. “Are you a thing to pity? Or to fear now?”

“That is entirely up to you,” Harry says. 

When Loki smiles again, it’s almost friendly. Only a little poison. 

Loki licks his dry lips and gives, “When your SHEILD started to experiment with the cube. They drew attention to this measly planet.”

“Enter you.”

Loki finds a slithery purr. “Enter me.”

“Enter the scepter to confirm your loyalty.”

Loki hesitates, unwilling to admit any susceptibility to the device. 

“But why?” Harry continues. “What do they want? Resources? Labor? Land?”

“They want,” Loki says with annoyance. “Death.”

“Pardon?”

“Death,” Loki repeats. “They are interested in the biology of divergent species because they are interested in killing them.”

“Why?”

Loki’s gone from half-terrified to full-blown annoyed. Which Harry is rather talented at inducing in people, honestly. 

“Their leader, their Father, is a halfbreed Titan with delusions of culling the universe. Only they are not delusions. He has the technology, the forces, to do it.”

Harry, frowning, asks, “For?”

“He believes,” Loki says, “he is wooing Death.”

“………What?”

Loki dares to look a tad delighted by the reaction. “He believes delivering the souls of the slain to his Mistress will win her affections. He leaves half the population alive on every planet they _cull_ so they can propagate and I imagine be available for culling again.”

Harry stares.

“Barbaric, no?” Loki smirks.

“Stupid.”

Loki’s eyebrows rise. “Oh?”

“That’s… That’s stupid. That’s… It’s tearing a woman’s handmade garden to gift her her own flowers. It’s absurd.”

Loki’s eyebrows have continued to rise. “Now that _is_ interesting. What would you give Death?”

“Life,” Harry answers, a little distracted. It’s the only answer possible. “He would have murdered half the planet? Has he already- How many has he-…” Harry stops as each question becomes more irrelevant. “He’s mad.”

“He generally is referred so by survivors. Oh, this is so very interesting now. You are a Death Worshipper.”

“A what? No. I don’t worship. It’s just… Everything already dies. Why would… Even if you do somehow imagine Death as a paramour, how does murder make any sense? It’s already going to her. Are you just… trying to expedite? Is he _ill_?”

“Oh. Was that directed at me or part of your rant?”

Harry ignores him. “People follow him?”

“Religiously.”

“Because… charisma? And promises of power?”

“Generally speaking. The weapons of mass destruction are also motivating,” Loki says archly. 

“Right. Just…” What the fuck. He realizes, “You _wanted_ to rule the planet with half the population gone?”

“ _No_ ,” he says with derision. “Even the idea of _attempting_ to stabilize your economy _with the population now_ makes me want to hang. With half the infrastructure missing, _ha_ , no. Your distribution of agriculture is shit by the way.”

“I’ll pass that along. Considering you were strong-armed into service, it’s surprising you didn’t give SHIELD this information earlier. You could have negotiated for amenities.”

“I don’t discuss war strategies with chimps.”

Harry gestures to himself. 

“You’re different,” Loki says.

“Because I’ve bedded monsters?”

“Because you do not _think_ like a measly Human.”

Harry considers that with his eyes hooded. “I think like a Human, Loki. I just don’t treat you like one.”

“Whatever,” he sneers. 

“It is in your interest to help us,” Harry says. “Even if we are just cannon fodder. Or a distraction.”

“Is that so?”

“Mm-hm. You failed them. You lost them an armada, the scepter, and the Tesseract,” he lists. “They’ll be coming for you. If they find out we don’t have the Tesseract anymore, they’ll comes for Asgard, and you love Asgard more than this backwater planet. What are a few more chimps for your people.” 

“They are not _my people_ ,” he snarls. 

“But it is your home.”

Loki’s gaze is fevered. 

“I do not _give_ things for _free_.”

“Let me put this another way then. You might have noticed that I have means of gathering information from off-world. What will happen when I whisper in an ear and they whisper in another ear and it all goes round and round the rosies and that army you’ve carefully avoided naming finds out you and the Tesseract are on Asgard? What happens when that army, the one you aren’t certain Asgard can defeat, comes to you? Two birds with one stone. I would prefer not to throw Asgard under the bus, but _your_ people are more adequately prepared to deal with what you called it, culling. You can ferry your population away. You have the means to rebuild. So. If you don’t tell us about that army, we’ll gather the information watching them burn the skies of your city first. Quid pro quo.”

Loki looks like murder. The seam of his lips crack. “Liar.”

“Loki,” Harry says, his voice low. He looks up into his eyes again, showing that blasphemous hollowness. “I do not lie.”

He’d make sure Thor is prepared, use the favor he’s owed if he has to, but he would rally that colossal, world-ending army and plant Asgard right in its crosshairs, and he’d watch. He’d force himself to watch and maybe sabotage what he could and set himself like a blight among them while Aes died. It would almost certainly work out best for Earth that way. Harry is not in the habit of sacrificing other people but the logic of pointing such an army as Asgard first is undeniable. 

“I see,” Loki says. He wars with himself, a private battle. “Very well. Be cannon fodder.”

If Harry has his way, the armada will barely even enter their star system. No one will have the chance to be cannon fodder. Guerrilla tactics are much more efficient. 

But Harry also rarely gets his way.

“Sure,” Harry says amicably.

So Loki talks. And Harry listens.

\- — — — -

“Why does the fleet need a Tesseract if they can manipulate, er, what’s it called? Bruce told me a term. Hyperbolic space? The thing where there are an infinite number of potential traveling lines connecting a point outside linear dimension.”

“The ship’s travel is effected by gravity wells.”

“Ah.” He considers that. “Yeah. Okay.”

Mathematically excluding black holes and super giants while calculating hyperbolic (or whatever) space travel precludes knowing where black holes and super giants are, which is a lot (from what Harry can tell) like trying to pinpoint where an ion is during any moment in time. 

“They can’t use something like the Bifröst bridge?”

“With that much mass?” Loki sneers.

Right.

\- — — — -

“But would an EMP work?”

“For the first wave perhaps,” Loki answers. “But a second wave would hang back out of range and you would have disrupted all your own instruments. If you’ve gotten to the point where they’ve landed on the planet, you’re dead anyway.”

Harry agrees. 

\- — — — -

Harry has contorted into seven different poses during the length of their discussion. He’d passed the urge for food and rest long ago. He’s gone longer without for less important things though. 

Loki, of a stronger constitution, looks just the same as when Harry entered. Sweaty, tired, baked. But no more so than the start. 

Loki’s biting gaze has become placid, the harshness mellowed into something introspective the longer they spoke. Harry is more mentally exhausted than anything else. 

“Do you actually believe you can fight a Titan? With an armada?” Loki asks. After hours of their back-and-forth, the sneer has transformed into a kind of skeptical pity.

“Who knows? Maybe while he’s distracted putting down us, you’ll be the one to sneak a knife in his back.”

Loki grins at that. “You’ll never cause that much trouble for him.”

“We already have,” Harry reminds him. “Stark flew a missile at him. He lost his vanguard, the scepter, the Tesseract, and _you_. Not bad for a handful of chimps.”

Loki continues to stare at him judiciously. They are winding to a close. “I made a promise. That one day, I would kill you.”

He thinks of Norsemen welcoming ice giants onto the battlefield because dying heroically made marginally more sense than starving to death in everlasting winter. “Do you always keep your promises?”

Loki laughs. “No. But I am interested in seeing how you’d die. I hope you do not disappoint.”

Harry stands. “It would be kind of funny. If I hit my head falling down some stairs.”

Loki doesn’t seem to find it as amusing. 

\- — — — -

When he walks towards the entrance of the cell, they open the doors. Cool air rushes at him. He’d forgotten about the dry heat. He walks around the foldable chair and up the trolley ladder to the vault door. It too buzzes open for him. Pleasantly prompt. 

Steve nearly falls backwards onto Harry’s shoes. He scrambles up, Bruce a second behind him. 

Harry stares at the both of them. How long have they sat there? 

Bruce wrings his hands. Steve looks concerned. 

The door closes with a hush, and Harry, too tired to consider any of the emotions they don’t bother to hide, walks away. 


	23. Exit Strategies (Part 1.5)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Very brief mention of past suicidal tendencies in the section where Bruce and Harry are arguing. Only two lines.

The door easing open against Harry’s back wakes him from a doze. The day was just sinking into evening when Harry began the interrogation. Now dawn is sprinkling over the compound. In mid-June, it is muggy even in the morning, but the wind hits from the ocean. It is cool but carries the strong scent of seaweed. 

Tony Stark pokes his head around the frame of the door. It can’t be more than half an hour since he escaped to the roof, specifically to avoid this kind of conversation. Stark shoves a bag of some sort — with the red logo of a restaurant — as a hopeful peace offering. Harry grudgingly moves aside. 

With a jaunty step, Stark joins him. The sky is a ponderous blue, blearily aware of the Earth as Stark sinks down onto the spongey bitumen beside him. He rifles through the bag and deposits a wrapped burger on the rooftop between them along with a bottle of dewy Tropicana OJ. Unopened. 

Stark eagerly chomps into his own serving — crinkly wrapper, the Human sound of his jaw chewing, and the even lighter rustle of his goatee against the paper. He’s finicky fingers, his bright inquisitive gaze for the moment cast out inside his own head.

After a few moments, watching and waiting, Harry takes the offering and peels back the wrapping. 

They eat. Stark licks sauce off his not-too-clean fingers, grease still embedded in his cuticles. His own drink comes from inside a thermos and makes clicks like it has ice. It leaves his teeth stained green. 

After Stark has finished one, wadding up the wrapper, and Harry is still nibbling on his first, Stark speaks, far too chipper.

“So, brooding?”

“Napping.”

“On the roof?”

“I thought it would be unoccupied.”

“Ouch,” Stark says, not sounding much in the way of reprimanded. He’s grinning, debonair, but his body language is loose. Not nearly as combative or aggressive as any other one of their interactions. “Do you mind if I stay?”

“Would it matter if I did?”

“I can actually fuck off.”

“I’ve yet to see it,” Harry returns.

He doesn’t tell him to leave though. Stark leaves a little gap. Harry fills it by cracking open that bottle of OJ. The headache he has is one of his very normal ones, not Scire induced, simply that of a long night and dehydration. 

“Did those guys ever come back?” is what Stark asks, which is not at all what Harry thought he would. 

“No.”

“What do they do? Interrogate you to make sure you aren’t giving up trade secrets? You go in to make them think you’re on a leash?”

“I _am_ on a leash.”

“When it suits you,” Stark says. 

“You think I control anything that’s done to me?” Harry asks him, void of any inflection but weariness. An eternal sense of fatigue. 

“I think…” Stark says. “You control the one thing you can very well. Yourself. Which is no simple feat,” Stark continues when Harry doesn’t speak. “I’m practically in awe of your poker face. I’d think you were one of those Buddhist thingies if you weren’t so brutal. Shit slides off you like water off a duck. Or whatever they say. Banal, actually. I’ll think of something better. More witty.”

He trails off. Losing momentum rather than gaining it in an uphill struggle for words. 

Stark is more disturbed than he let on. From the interrogation? Or something else? 

“Did you see them?” Harry finds himself asking. “In the portal?”

Stark’s eyes tighten. They are usually hidden by sunglasses. Naked, the strain is visible. His jaw doesn’t lock. He doesn’t flinch. But his eyes rock around in his head, flicking about frenetically for something to hold onto. But there is nothing and his restlessness moves into an insouciant shrug. His hand pats his breast, unearthing the shades, but he fiddles with them rather than put them on. The temples are opened, closed, rocked.

“Yeah.”

“Loki confirmed your impression.”

Stark smiles bitterly. “My impression? That’s a, uh, nice way of putting it.”

Harry still doesn’t call out the proper word for it. Even as inept as he is, he knows Stark’s pride won’t take to naming it fear. 

Harry turns his stare away, allowing him some privacy. He understands why Stark wears sunglasses everywhere now. 

“I’m searching,” Harry says, “for a reason not to tear them apart. I can’t think of one.”

Tony jerks towards him to stare.

“You think we can beat them,” he seems to realize.

“You don’t?”

“Nooooo. No, I absolutely do,” Tony says, something bubbling, like champagne, like bile. “I just, _heh_ , didn’t expect anyone to agree with me.”

“Impossible odds don’t intimidate me.”

“Yeah, I noticed.”

Stark’s voice had soften, and he noticed. With a cough, he finally plants the shades onto his face. It’s not light enough to need them, but they aren’t dark, more a suggestion of cover. 

“Hey. Just, uh, so you know. We cleared out the monitor room. I mean, when you started, you know. It was just me, Thunder Blunder, and Agent Agent.”

“Thor and Coulson?”

“Yep.”

Harry considers this and gets distracted by another question concerning him.

“When you flew that missile, why didn’t you ask Thor?”

The question seems to unhinge Stark even more than the other one.

“Sorry, what? No. I mean. S’not really… what I had in my mindset. I was thinking about my statue. Possibly a park. Dedicated to me. Going out with a bang. What the old man would have wanted.”

He chugs from the thermos, possibly to shut himself up. He glances once away and then back, mind already ahead in a jump.

“Why were you so adamant to save me?” he throws back.

“I’m trying this whole ally-gig,” Harry says with soft intention. He glances over. At Stark’s chin more than anything. “I think we’re supposed to help each other.”

The words, the quote, seems to hit. But Stark doesn’t look like he knows what to do with them. 

He coughs again, looks away. 

Harry can’t sit on this information. The MoM might have its wrinkly fingers in SHIELD, but Harry doesn’t trust them not to overreact. Or under-react. And he’s chafing at being under SHIELD’s eye. Soon, he’ll show them something he didn’t mean to, all the excuse the MoM would need to Obliviate everyone and round Harry up for treason. 

He’s loathe to leave Bruce here. On Ross’ turf. 

But he’s also build up a really good instinct for his own self-destructive tendencies. Tendencies that tend to have a blast radius. He’s languishing in uselessness.

He doesn’t mind Bruce being important now, but Harry can’t be his lab assistant. He can’t be trailing behind him immersed in government secrets. No one trusts Harry, and Harry isn’t in a position to disabuse them of their very valid suspicions. 

Harry has never been good under a microscope. He knows how to stay quiet but he has a bad habit of poking his nose into anything with a whiff of trouble. And a city full of new dead ringing like klaxon bells from tip to stern is not the best place for him while he’s carrying a spotlight. 

But Bruce.

There’s so much to do. So many reasons he needs to leave.

But Bruce isn’t safe.

Harry breathes in. “Stark-”

“Tony.” 

“Stark,” Harry repeats, trying to temper his voice from being unkind. “How attached are you to Bruce?”

“Oh, a lot. I’d say a lot. We’re bosom-buddies. Wait. Does that mean we’re friends or we share… Never mind. Point is. Yeah. Science soulmate. Fell into lab partners as soon as I saw those adorable glasses. Why? Is this the shovel talk? Oh, gimme. Not that I’m, uh, not entirely not unsettled by your general… whatever-ness. You’re just going to let me ramble forever aren’t you? That… I always thought that would be nice, but it is feeling genuinely un-nice right now.” 

“I’m gauging how willing you might be to protect him.”

“Yeah. Ok. Totally. Whyyyyyy? Jumping ship?”

“Is a ship going down?”

“Literally?”

“What do you think?”

“I think Bruce won’t care for you skedaddling.”

“Bruce doesn’t control where I go.”

Stark points at him. “Fair. But I thought you had…” He wrinkles his nose. “A dynamic. Where did all your expressions of love go?”

“Somewhere in the realm of not-your-business, Stark. You are obsessively controlling though. Do you think love is controlling your partner?”

“I think love is not abandoning them.”

“Do you think I am abandoning him?”

Stark looks him over evenly. “You have a habit of deflecting answers with questions.”

“You have a habit of poking people to see how they react.”

He hears Stark control himself, inhaling deeply… and exhaling. 

“I’ll keep him safe.”

“I take promises very seriously.”

“Yeah? Me too.” Stark sniffs and looks at him. “This is, uh, the type of leaving where you’re coming back then?”

“I intend to.”

Stark hums. “Take Caplocks,” he says. “Yeah, I’ll fund an action-packed road trip so the two of you can get your feels out.”

Harry is vaguely shocked. The suggestion is actually a good one, but that’s not what he finds shocking. 

He never expected that Stark would have noticed, or cared about, the bitter fugue that surrounds Steve. Steve’s grief is a bag around his head slowly suffocating him. He’s lonely, isolated, and in self-denial. Harry, who was not invited to know these things, has politely refrained from picking at it. He thought Fury perhaps would correct the issue. Harry hadn’t considered Stark, that he would reach beyond the resentment he has for him, for whatever reason, to want to help.

Taking Steve on the trip would have complications. But it would also assuage SHIELD. The institution has a lot of respect for him. They would trust that Steve would be able to handle him and stop him if their suspicions on his character prove correct. 

“I will ask,” Harry says.

They turn once more to the tepid sunrise. 

After only a minute though, Harry sighs.

“Gotta tell Bruce.”

Tony laughs. “Oh, not it! So not it. That’s on you.”

Tony climbs to his feet.

“If you decide to take a swan dive off the roof,” Tony says. “Please hit a minion.”

“Tootles,” Harry says dryly.

Tony nearly opens the door into his face, but he doesn’t. Because he’s supposed to be cool.

\- — — — -

“You’re doing what?” Bruce, on the seat beside him, deadpans the next day.

After a series of exhaustive strategy meetings and Fury in his face, an SUV stuffed with the Initiative (sans Thor and Coulson who had the luxury of traveling with Dr. Foster) was likely not the best choice for this discussion. But after they (hopefully) send Thor, Loki, and the Tesseract through the Bifröst, Harry wants to leave.

“Road trip,” Harry says. “With Steve. Or possibly a boat trip. I don’t know. It’s in the air.”

“I can fly a plane,” Steve says, parked in the seat behind them.

“Can you though?” Stark mutters in the driver’s seat. Romanov, passenger-side, smacks him with the back of her hand.

“Face it, Banner,” Barton says, beside Steve in the back. “You’ve been kicked to the curb.”

Romanov looks in the mirror to shoot him a warning too.

They could have taken two vans. Harry thinks Fury is punishing someone.

“Is Cap the new model or the old model?” Stark continues. 

Romanov’s soft sigh is barely heard over the AC. 

Harry wonders if Fury is punishing Romanov.

Bruce fiddles with his glasses. “I’ll come.”

Harry hums. Bruce has never wanted to come with him before. “You’re staying with Stark. Because you want to stay with Stark because he has lawyers and building security.” 

“And an electron collider,” Stark adds. 

“I don’t like leaving you-”

“Aww,” Barton starts before Bruce bulls over.

“-You’re stupid and suicidal and you always get yourself kidnapped.”

Harry had not been expecting the heat in Bruce’s tone. “I’m not-”

“Four times, not including Loki,” Bruce says. “That I know.” Which wasn’t what Harry was going to argue but-

“I agree about that time with the-”

“Ah-huh.”

“But one of those was an accident.”

“Falling asleep in someone’s car trunk counts for sheer stupidity.”

“Okay, but you can’t get kidnapped by the police. That’s just arrest.”

“Bullshit.”

“It’s-”

“Are you going to argue I was ‘arrested’ by the Army?” 

Harry gives up his attempt to protest.

“What about number four?” Barton asks. 

“What?”

“He said four times. That was three.”

Bruce doesn’t answer. He stares out the window, silently fuming while he works on his breathing exercises. 

No one speaks for a while. 

“I’ll be fine?” Harry tries awkwardly. It’s been over a month since the Battle, and Bruce never protested his erratic jaunts this intensely before. 

“Statistically unlikely and empirically untrue.”

“I don’t need your permission, Bruce,” Harry tries to remind him.

Bruce turns to look at him, eyes blazing. “I am concerned for your safety. You always taunt people like it’s your personal mission to get the shit beat out of you.”

“Just because you like putting bullets in your mouth-”

“ _Woah_ hey guys…”

“-doesn’t mean I do the same.”

“I have a monster under my skin that spits them out,” Bruce argues. “What do you have? You actually got shot this time!”

“Fellas-”

“Bruce, you tried to leave me in India. Is leaving only allowed when you’re doing it?”

Someone whistles.

“That was for your safety,” Bruce practically hisses.

“I’m not your pet.”

“ _Hey_ ,” the voice says louder.

“Obviously not. The dog I actually had, the one that also got _shot_ , wasn’t half as stubborn!”

“Look, doctor, let’s-”

“I don’t stay were you put me-” Harry starts before Bruce explodes.

“ **You could have died!** ”

Harry, startled, says the wrong thing, knows it’s the wrong thing even as it comes out careening dumbly from his stupid mouth. 

“So?”

It fills the raw, abhorrent silence that follows. Everyone is cringing, except for Romanov, who is watching Bruce in the mirror. 

Bruce says, “Stop the car.”

Stark does so with an immediacy that suggests he was just waiting for Bruce’s permission. 

Bruce crashes out of the vehicle, nearly throwing the door off. He stands on the sidewalk, panting in the summer heat and the wary stares of pedestrians and cars as they honk around them. 

He takes off briskly down the street. 

Romanov, expression blank, swings out of the van with more grace and trails him. She does not bother with subterfuge. 

Steve sighs. “That could have gone better.” He leans over and closes the door. 

In the awkward tension, Stark puts them all out of their misery and turns on the radio. Barton cusses. 

Harry wonders why talking to Bruce isn’t as easy as talking to alien mass murderers. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I have two more chapters until the end of Part 1 and 1.5. The Chapter 25 I have now is epilogue-small. I'll be working on Part 2. I have chapters written but I have to sketch a plot to tie them together and figure out the timeline. That might take a while. I write everyday but I am also dependent on inspiration, so just a heads up that a potentially long hiatus is coming up soon.


	24. Farewells (Part 1.5)

During the preparations for the final transport, Bruce and Harry avoid one another. 

The area is surprisingly wooded. Over a month in the clogged industry of baffled and injured spirits, the taste of the healthier ground quiets the klaxon in Harry’s bones. Decades worth of pine needles and sweet gum barbs till placidly into mulch. 

“If you start stripping and run off, I’m going to fucking lose it,” Stark mumbles as he supervises the arching structure of bolts and metal and copper wires via glassy tablet. 

Harry flicks one of the sweet gum pods at him. Stark bats it from his cheek with a scowl.

The wind whistles, catching on the serrated fauna of birches and elm. He smells a ground spring to the north. 

Thor excusing himself from a cluster of scientists (and a woman in a beanie) and approaches Harry. His brother is left in the deft hands of a six-person guard overseen by Coulson. 

He smells like sunlight capping the upper stratum. A powerful, intoxicating vitality that seeds the underbelly of clouds. For a moment, just faintly, Harry feels something dry within him turn towards Thor in search of water. 

When Thor stands in front of him, he removes his braces to offer his right forearm. 

Harry’s eyes widen. 

They are being watched — with curiosity and suspicion. 

Harry didn’t expect this. 

Harry places his meager arm against the inside of Thor’s wrist. 

Thor tries to smile but worry pinches the expression. His fingers are gentle but firm at the crux of Harry’s elbow. 

“My thanks, my respect, and my favor, Harry Son of Hart,” Thor says. “Maybe one day, I can count you among my friends.”

Harry cannot fathom why a prince, a god, would court the alliance of a ragged vagabond, but he sees the humility in the offering, the way Thor is opening his mind to the potential of Earth’s strengths. His effort to see strength instead of something else to protect. 

“Safe travels, Thor.”

Thor does not look insulted by the lack of reciprocation, though from his perspective he has every right to be.

As inexperienced as Thor is in all but the most heavy-handed matters of politics, Harry thinks he might shape into a good king someday.

Harry is then astonished with himself. With such a Dumbledore-like thought. 

Director Fury steps to the assembled platform. 

“We good?”

“The resonance is calibrated to pick up the signals emitted by the Einstein-Rosen bridge from the Asgardians’ side,” Bruce says, pushing his glasses. “If it’s emitting.”

“It is emitting,” Thor assures them.

“Thanks to my readings,” Dr. Foster says. “The ones you stole. And kept. And used.”

“For global security, Dr. Foster.”

“Is that your excuse for everything?” Stark asks.

Fury grunts. “It’s a good excuse.”

“It’s illegal,” Foster argues.

“Not under the Homeland Security Act.”

“That policy is used to spy on civilians and impinge on our democratic rights,” the beanie woman says. 

Steve leans over to Bruce. “Is that true?”

Bruce seesaws his hand, and Steve gives a weary sigh.

Thor and Loki step onto the platform. 

“Here’s hoping you don’t get crushed in the singularity,” Stark says jauntily. 

Steve whips his head around to look at him, but no one else reacts, grimly watching the instruments. 

The machine begins to hum, but it builds power slowly. Harry glances at the mirrored tanks. They look like bulging eyes around the pentagram-like cage. 

He realizes with bemusement that he can recognize arithmancy. There must be another mathematical reason for the shape of the construction, but Harry recognizes the nodes adjacent in the icosahedral structure, once Thor and Loki inhabit the middle, from his long-ago study sheets when he was practicing for the apparation license. 

It can’t be the same. Magic is much more sympathetic to symbology than physics is. Five facing alpha points — head, shoulders, pelvic crests — with a sixth node for center body mass in the center — pulled toward an inner node magicians call the aether point — a deconstruction of space and time where all physical material is and isn’t (very esoteric stuff Harry never bothered to warp into logic) — then a reconstruction of the five and the sixth node into mundane space somewhere else. A parody of instantaneous travel. 

“Interested?” Stark asks as the power builds inside those strange spheres. 

Harry doesn’t answer.

Stark continues smirking. Unlike the SHIELD scientists, he doesn’t seem worried the thing will collapse into an explosion. 

“Foster’s not a bad engineer,” Stark says. 

“Patronizing,” Harry notes. 

With a rueful grin, Stark sighs. “Alright. She’s wicked smart.” 

To his credit, Stark looks pretty gleeful about it. Delighted to have more people in his sandbox.

Harry is actually curious about how the machine works. Magic and science are not diametrically opposed, but — as Charlie’s friend Taman put it once to Arthur — “they interact funky.” Harry has never understood how Arthur could build a functioning flying car that could romp in the Forbidden Forest, but how, no matter what Seamus’ did, the electronics in his digital watch would always be reduced to black smoke and slag not five minutes on the Hogwarts grounds. 

Something of the quiet questions must appear on Harry’s face because Stark starts explaining. No biology involved — Bruce always manages to lose Harry on protein structures the very moment he tries to explain something — but “subatomic particles” translates a little better to Harry’s understanding of magic. 

The mirrors are reflecting invisible electrons, rapidly accelerating as they bounce off the surface, providing the energy to fuel the device. Stark’s expertise in engineering came in as they had to find a way to channel the energy without losing any discharge or overheating the cables and circuits. Dr. Foster is the mastermind behind the construction of the bridge itself — the placement of the nodes that first intrigued Harry. 

What Harry actually concludes from the explanation is a question.

Is Stark physically producing magic? 

It’s not a magic generated from the mystical. If it’s a magic at all, it is a layer below that. Maybe… Like using the electricity directly from a brain’s neurons without bothering the skeletal nerves — if he had to fight for a metaphor. It’s the collision course of the universe itself, electrons rising and falling — not metamorphic death, not the fluid poetry of soul, or even ghosts of gods shedding light.

“What?” Stark asks when he rolls to a stop. The platform is buzzing loudly now, whirling blades that pump wind at them, but Stark is looking at Harry, perturbed. “Why are you looking at me like that?”

The beanie woman is yelling, “See you! Come again! Without the invasion please!”

“How am I looking at you?” Harry asks. Not to be factious. He honestly doesn’t know.

Stark frowns and pouts.

A sound like a cracking rifle — louder than an apparation pop — carries a concussive force throughout the clearing. Harry plants his feet, as does Stark, grabbing hold of a table, but a few scientists yell and fall over. A shadow as light is pulled into the hole passes over them, a bending flux of gravity knocking everyone’s inner ear sideways, before it all clears up. 

Foster turns off the machine and the blades’ whirling dims. The platform, sans a few dented panels, is empty.

“Did that work?” Fury demands.

Bruce glances at a reading. “Sure.”

Fury gives him a baleful look.

“Let’s do it again,” Stark crows. “Hop on, Nick.”

“How about no,” the man says and looks at the three scientists. “If ya’ll murdered two galactic princes, I’m handing you all over to All-Daddy.”

“Wow, did not expect that to catch on,” Stark mutters.

“With all due respect, sir,” Jane Foster says, clearly meaning the opposite, eyes pinpoints of ire. “What do you mean _you all_?”

Fury ignores her. 

“Alright, clean up,” he orders, channeling schoolmarm. 

Stark chuckles at all and sundry as he jams his sunglasses back on. He moves to throw an arm over Harry, changes his mind, and deftly sweeps up Bruce instead. 

“Let’s do lunch before we send off Chibi-quatch and the Dorito!”

“I don’t think-”

“Bruce,” Harry whispers, that alone.

“I’ll keep him safe,” Steve says as they start the long walk back towards the vehicles, not a one of them interested in helping to dismantle the machine. 

“No offense, Steve, but I sincerely doubt it.”

“Not even Captain America good enough babysitter for boo?” Stark jeers, trotting. 

“Tony,” Bruce says, starting to get growly. 

“Bruce,” Harry says, and somehow the soft, defeated tone is enough to cut through to him. He looks him in the eye. “I need to.”

He shouldn’t need to clarify. Bruce has seen the depressive, destructive moods he can get into when he stays still for too long — why he goes hunting down human traffickers and kiddie fiddlers and men-eaters on a whim. Why he has sex with anyone who expresses interest. Even occasionally Very Bad Ideas. Because feeling a consequence, even a bad one, is always better than the Nothing gnawing him away. 

Harry can’t afford to do that here, with SHIELD and the MoM and Ross watching him.

Bruce stills to look at him, and his expression shifts.

A sweet little warbler calls for their partner. A woodpecker chirps and cicadas buzz. The sprites, disinterested in Humans, peer cautiously at Harry. 

Bruce exhales through his nose and continues walking. 

“Fine.”

“Thank you,” Harry says magnanimously. 

Bruce bends and chucks a pine cone at him. 

Harry dodges and lackadaisically aims a kick at Bruce’s midriff. Bruce, familiar with his agility and sallies, catches his ankle. He frowns at him. “What happened to your shoes?”

By which he means the lack of them, the leather boots stuffed in his back pockets.

Harry presses forward, claiming a _whoof_ of breath out of Bruce as he bows slightly under the pressure. In the slight lack, Harry folds his spine backward. Bruce narrowly avoids the quick uppercut via foot to the jaw, scrambling back.

Harry rotates out of the handstand, hands and feet pressed together on the ground for an instant before he bends back up. Spine unnaturally fluid. Bruce, retreated out of striking distance, glowers at him. Stark, somewhere to the left, mutters a swear in an appreciative tone. 

“I’m too old for that,” Bruce grouses. “ _You’re_ too old for that.”

“Just let me kick you then,” Harry says reasonably. 

“Puh,” Bruce replies eloquently. 

Bruce knows martial arts. A lot of empty hand techniques and self-defense he practiced into redundancy before Harry even met him. He doesn’t like using it though. It makes him anxious. A reminder that he’s not safe. 

Harry simply likes the physicality of it without the sticky discharge and drama of sex. 

“I’m not too old,” Steve pipes up. His nose wrinkles. “Sort of.” He looks Harry up and down in a purely platonically appreciative way. “Never sparred with someone that bendy.”

Stark scoffs but keeps his comments to himself. 

In the distraction, Harry throws another kick at Bruce’s head, purely to see what he does. 

Which is sputter and block and plant Stark between him and Harry. Though he’d be manipulating Harry’s sloppy stance if he were truly annoyed.

“You _sure_ you want to go with him?” Bruce snarks at Steve. 

“What do you think?” Steve asks Harry. 

Harry shrugs. “I love Bruce but he’s a downer.”

“ _Me?_ ” Bruce squawks, outrage overriding that natural internal dampener he has on his emotions. 

Stark looks too amused by all of this.

“You complain about everything,” Harry says. Bruce continues to sputter. “Don’t look in the hole-”

“Snakes!”

“The water’s not clean-”

“Parasites!” he hisses, voice dropping into a lower register. 

“Don’t flirt with-”

“ _Married women!_ ” He loses the low register, returning to shrill as this example seemingly becomes above and beyond what criticism he can take seriously. 

“I don’t go where I’m not invited,” Harry says reasonably. 

Steve looks both scandalized and cautiously intrigued. “This trip feels like it’s going to be enlightening.”

“Hmm. I don’t plan where I go,” Harry advises. 

Steve shoves his hands into the back of his khakis. “Sounds like what coin flips are for.”

Oh. He’s a lot less anal than Bruce.

“Hypothetically speaking,” Harry says slowly, finally beginning to register how different traveling with Steve as a companion may be. “If you found something interesting but maybe dangerous, would you poke it, or leave it alone?”

“Oh definitely poke it,” Steve says immediately with a kind of droll self-knowledge. 

Harry, who has mimicked Bruce’s innate paranoia for three years, feels the gears in his head shifting.

“ _Ay, revendo hijo de las mil putas_ ,” Bruce mutters between gritted teeth. 

Stark bursts out into shocked giggles. 

“ _Que te folle un pez_ ,” Harry returns. 

He doesn’t usually responds to Bruce’s insults. He won’t admit that he took the time to look that one up on the internet. 

Bruce’s eyes bug at him.

“ _You’re a dick_ ,” Bruce tells him in Portuguese. 

“ _I hang my dirty underwear on your mother’s crucifix_ ,” Harry deadpans in Romanian, which is possibly the nicest insult the vila taught him and has the added benefit of being one of the languages none of them apparently know. 

“ _How many languages do you speak?_ ” Stark asks smug-like in an Italian so New York Harry’s entire withered soul cringes. He ignores the question on principle.

They’ve escaped the edge of the woods, approaching the pack of SUVs.

“ _How many languages_ do _you speak?_ ” Steve later asks in more manageable Florentine Italian as they pile in.

Bruce takes the front passenger, leaving Harry and Steve to the row in the back.

They buckle in while Stark grumpily adjusts the seat. Too low for him. 

Fluently? He’s never thought to count. 

English of course. The Neo-Latin that mixes with some Greek that most magicians in Europe use for formal engagements. Gaelic from living Under-the-hill. French. Probably. He’s ten years rusty. And the Romanian-Russian-Bulgarian-Polish-Ukrainian hodgepodge the vila spoke. He knows enough Mandarin, Hindi, Spanish, and Farsi to get by on the road and the rudimentary basics of Italian, Portuguese, Urdu, Turkish, and German. Nothing from Africa, nothing east of China, and none of the Native languages of the Americas. 

“Four probably,” he answers, since the vila honestly only gave him bits and pieces of any language east of Belgium. “How many do you know?” he asks politely.

“Probably eight,” Steve admits, sheepish. “The serum, you know. Makes it a little easier.”

Witches and wizards of any ilk have a gift of tongues. It’s a passive form of magic.

Oh, he forgot parseltongue. 

Does speaking to snakes actually count?

“Harry,” Bruce says aggrieved from the front seat. “You definitely speak at least nine.”

“No?”

“I’ve heard you.”

“Not fluently.”

With a wondrous look, Steve asks, “How many languages can you speak not-fluently?”

Harry is not going to count parseltongue. Languages that translate the same as English in his head don’t count. 

“You mean… Enough to trade for food? Ask directions? That sort of thing?” he asks Steve. Steve nods. Harry counts again. “Uh. Sixteen? I think.”

Stark makes a strange strangled sound from the front. The van decelerates a little before Bruce shunts him a glare. 

Of course no one, especially Stark, would believe he knows sixteen languages. Even not-fluently. That’s a lot for a magician, though average for a diplomat. Only the ones who travel as often as Harry, which is not a lot. Magicians are, in general, sedentary. 

Oh. He forgot Old Norse. 

Though he’s never spoken it. 

“Wow,” Steve says, eyes alight. “That’s amazing! There I was gammin’ but that’s- …geez!” 

Harry sees Bruce shoot Stark a look to shut him up, which he kindly does. Harry figures even Stark knows enough not to be cruel occasionally. 

He leans against the door to look over the man. Steve’s body is a brickhouse but that heart… 

Harry is completely earnest when he asks, “How’d you ever keep such a good heart?”

Steve flushes and ducks his head. He twists his hands up in his lap. He still manages to say through his discomfort, “If it’s there, it’s on account of my ma.”

By the end of the trip, Harry’s afraid he’s going to care for him just as much as he cares for Bruce. 

“ _I don’t know whether to be more worried about you or him_ ,” Bruce says from up in front in Hindi.

Harry hums in agreement.


	25. Somewhere Over the Rainbow, Blue Birds Fly (Part 1.5)

Rather than SHIELD’s Washington office, they pull into a parking deck. On the roof, Stark jumps out, romps to two motorcycles and says, “Tah-dah!”

One is a slim, sleek custom bike with rough terrain tread and thick shock absorbers. In the typical Stark flare, it is capped in crimson but the exhaust pipes and bellied engine are still silver rather than Stark’s flamboyant gold. It looks a little like a bird of prey.

The other one is a lovingly restored vintage Triumph. Steve’s face goes hard with conflicted yearning when he sees it. 

“Which would you like?” Stark asks.

“There was no need-” Steve winds up.

Harry crouches to look inside the Triumph, resting his hand gently on the metal. It still carries the taste of Stark’s fingers, a frenetic need to please and provide spilling from soul to metal, blanketing the emotion of its previous owners almost surgical in intent. 

The custom one feels more organic, a product of Stark’s natural inclination to _create_ and _build_. 

This one is _new_. No one has ever ridden it. It had been delivered, likely on a trailer. Stark probably test-drove it, but no one else has hardly touched it. In the hands of a magician, (build by _Stark_ ) it’s not foolish anthropomorphism to say it could grow a personality.

It’s so young. 

Harry realizes that he’s caressing the body gently with his fingertips at the same time he notices he has distracted Stark from his not-an-argument with Steve. 

“Like it?” Stark asks with a bit too much sharp in his grin. 

“Who did you make it for?”

Stark retracts the sharpness but his gaze is shuttered. “No one. You. If you want it.”

Harry withdraws his hand. “Oh, I can’t drive.”

Stark and Steve both give him incredulous looks. 

“You,” Stark says. “Can’t drive.”

Harry doesn’t comprehend their disbelief until he remembers the Chitauri chariot he piloted through a falling building. 

“Ah. Doing it that way gives me seizures.”

“Don’t do that,” Bruce tells him.

“How?” Stark demands, hungrily curious.

“The chariot was computerized.” He tips his head, thinking. “I had to change my thought patterns to interact with the digital language but I also had to keep my organic brain working, which creates dissonance, so if I’m distracted my body seizes..” 

“Harry,” Bruce says. “I hate when you explain things. It makes everything so much worse.”

Harry doesn’t say that the _scire_ charm isn’t meant to do anything like this. Not at all. It’s meant to expose spells and curses on items like jewelry. But Harry had adapted it, to use his brain instead of a wand, to look at plant-life because knowing what it can do before he puts it in his mouth is important. Advancing it into technology had been a moment of what-if that he didn’t think properly though. He still suffers from epilepsy. 

“So,” Stark drawls. “You can’t just control any random machinery?”

“Like your armor?” Harry says, bluntly to the heart of the matter. “There are obstacles. The Chitauri didn’t protect their machines from being used like that because they assumed it being biologically unique to them was enough of a deterrent. Your armor is more personal. Without your permission, I could, theoretically, control it, but I think trying to do so would kill me, which would defeat the purpose, unless you go on a murder spree in the thing and I need to sacrifice myself to disable it.”

“ _Harry_.” Bruce says. Just once. Emphatic. 

“What?”

“ _Dire circumstances_. You could have just said _Only in dire circumstances_ and left it at that.”

“He’s worried I can steal it,” Harry argues. “Someone who codes that neurotically is not going to accept Dire Circumstances.” He air-quotes. “It’s too vague.”

“It is very vague,” Stark says.

“And you’re powerful and affluent enough to make my life uncomfortable if you felt threatened by me, so I’d rather if you didn’t.”

Stark doesn’t seem to know what to say to that. 

“Harry,” Bruce says very calmly. “Remember that talk we had about how your honesty makes people uncomfortable?”

“Everything about me makes people uncomfortable,” Harry says. Honestly. 

Bruce sighs. 

\- — — — -

“He’s an enormous pain in my butt,” Bruce tells Steve as they ready to leave. (Stark won the battle over Steve taking the bike.) “And he’s _definitely_ going to get hurt somehow. But if he dies on your watch.” Bruce’s eyes harden. “I know a lot of things about the serum.”

Taken aback, Steve nods. Harry, sitting behind him in helmet and goggles, tries not to pay attention. He looks at Stark.

“If Ross gets his hands on him-”

“Yeah yeah. Noted,” Stark interrupts. 

It’s difficult to look malicious with biker goggles on but he tries anyway. Success is limited. 

The saddlebags are full.

Steve peels steady and confident out of the deck. The bike is heavier between his legs than a broom. Steve baby-steps him into learning how to ride, testing their weight distribution on the blue highways that sprawl the country.

“Where to?” Steve asks. 

Harry hums. “Somewhere over the rainbow?”

He feels the laugh catching in the man’s abs under his hand. 

“I guess I’m Dorothy,” he says somewhat rueful. “Who are you then?”

It takes only a beat for Harry to answer, “Toto.”

Steve slants him a glance sideways. 

They follow the road. 

\- — — — -

Epilogue

.:Minerva:.

There is something egg-white about the morning. Minerva takes her tea straight, the bitterness roasting on her tongue, as she sits at the terrace, wrapped in a shaw to protect her bones from the dew. Mist rolls over the green. It’s lovely. Every single morning. She never gets tired of seeing it.

When he had these rooms, Albus had them swathed in violets and maroons. Something nearly kaleidoscopic. The fabrics would occasionally hold silvery chimes, maybe glints of coin, or the skeletons of perfectly preserved but tiny beasts. Keys. Animated porcelain. The shelves were overtaken by snow globes, empty boxes of candy whose design he fancied. He was an eccentric man with a taste for tinsel and the small blue eggshells of robins. 

Minerva kept a few of his chimes. The glass ones and the fluted ones made of beaten tin. Her grandmother’s crochets hangs on the walls though, insulating the stone. The shelves carry the warped wood she likes, petrified stumps and river-smoothed branches moving in between shapes. Snugly woven together. 

Her hair streams in silver, unbound to soak in the sunrise and the gentle wisps of her tea. The trees wicker back at her. Long and ancient and groaning. Not too unlike her, she thinks with a smirk. 

No hellions on the lawn, no students skipping the corridors. The Giant Squid lazes an arm through the surface of the lake, maybe enjoying the fresh morning. It’s just her, the squid, Hagrid, and Poppy, the rest of the grounds empty for summer. 

This is before she notes a whisper in the wards.

Even after over a decade of peace, Minerva’s reaction is soldier-sharp. Her cup set aside, her hair bounding into a braid, as she summons her wand and speaks with the stone. 

_No_ , they roll. The taste of ash, peat, and gneiss. _No danger._

An elf — Winky — pops into her room. She is holding a bird, a starling. Made of soot and dark glistening blood. The starling is dead but it moves. 

She would be shocked and appalled if she wasn’t already familiar with Harry’s new brand of magic.

The starling twitches in Winky’s long-fingered hand. “Came through the kitchen’s chimney, Miss.”

Relieved no one is invading and no one is hurt, Minerva sits back in one of her armchairs. “Thank you, Winky. You may release it.”

The bird leaves black on Winky’s hands. It stutters awkwardly before regaining flight. It angles towards the open frame, towards the fresh and powdery white before being driven in an unnatural urge back towards Minerva. It lands on the arm of the chair, opens its yellow beak.

“Thanos,” it chants, rickety like a record. “Thanos. Thanos. Not. Thanos. Not safe. Thanos. Come in. Coming. Danger. Not Thanos. Titan. Thanos. Not safe. Come in.”

Minerva transforms into a cat. She catches it nimbly in her mouth, a little distasteful for the soot. The bird flutters, but before Minerva can crush its little body, the Death magic keeping it animated winks out. It goes still. Instinct has Minerva eating it. She hasn’t yet had her breakfast, and the bird’s blood is rich and metallic against her tongue. 

She gobbles it, somewhat messily. Feathers go a bit haywire. Blood stains the upholstery. Harry’s message travels down the back of her throat, clearer than the poor starling could make it. 

She tastes Harry’s caution, his concern.

The head and beak crunch under her jaws and a vision of its final few seconds fill her belly. Harry, more heavily bearded than the last time she saw him. He’s holding her, speaking down with a mouth abhorrently large to a songbird. His eyes are riotously green. UV light drifts off him. 

_A planet-destroyer_ , Harry says. _His name is Thanos, a Titan. He is coming and we, both magic and muggle, are not safe. We are in danger of destruction if we wait, if we don’t prepare. We need cohesion, and we need allies. Speak to those I cannot if you still have faith in me. All my best._

_Thank you, little one_ , Harry says to the bird before he crushes it between his hands, demolishing the memory like such a small and fragile ribcage as well.

Minerva transforms back into Human. The taste of raw blood and wet feather is far less pleasant on her Human palette. Quickly, she summons a journal and quill to recount the words before they dissolve completely, letting her tongue hang out so as not to contaminate the rest of her mouth.

Finished, Winky hands her a linen, a bowl of warm water, and a mint, which she uses with gratitude. 

“Mister Harry is safe?” Winky asks. Her voice squeaky as a hinge still perfectly carries the hint of concern. Harry remains a complicated subject for her. 

“It seems so,” Minerva says. She rolls the mint, scowling at both the remains of her tea and the bird. 

Winky vanishes the mess of both. Minerva nods her thanks. 

“Mister Harry is never safe,” Winky says. 

Minerva sighs. “That is certainly also true.”

**END OF PART 1.5**

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I am honestly a little upset that this will be the last update for a while. Everyone who has commented has made this such an amazing experience for me. More than amazing. Loving. And I deeply thank you all. 
> 
> I can't say how long the hiatus will be, but I need to have all of Part 2 drafted and organized before I post any of it. Reviewing and submitting it daily has clearly been the healthiest for me and it lets me answer comments when they come in, rather than allowing myself to get distracted. 
> 
> I think I started writing this in 2012, when I only had a vague idea that I considered Tony's descent into the Tesseract portal bull crap - how the heck would he fall back; the vacuum would have created suction; it doesn't make any sense. I introduced Harry into the equation to as a ridiculous what-if, and a ridiculous number of edits later created an entire story with a terrible and intricate backstory. Eight years later, while I can't promise a time-line for updates, I can promise that this story will never be abandoned. 
> 
> Again, I thank you all for reading this with me and I hope I'll see you into the future!


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